Like what’s preventing us from living in a world like WALL-E in the future?
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Nothing happens to the trash in landfills. i had the experience of doing work in a landfill, they had to dig down to the bottom of the damn thing to fix a broken leachate line….the pipe that carries the black, foul smelling “garbage juice” from whatever water leaches down through the pile.
The process required digging down in steps with a large excavator, I’m not sure how many feet deep it was. I was surprised that the garbage they were bringing up from the bottom was NOT rotting, it looked like it had been put in there yesterday when it was from many decades ago that they started the landfill. there was newspapers coming up still in decent shape, you would think that would be the first thing to rot.
The process of rotting requires air to get at the material and there is not rotting if something is covered. even the stuff at the top would not be rotting because it is covered with a cap of topsoil to lessen the smell.
There are all sorts of things that can break down stuff on the surface of our planet, wind, rain, uv light, bacteria, small critters but none of those can get at the garbage we buried, it will be there for a long, long time and that is why people have been interested in new ways to manage our waste when we generate it at such alarming rates.
Edit: After reading a few other comments i am reminded, the methane would not be produced if nothing was rotting, so , something IS working down there but on a whole different timeline like radioactive half-lives.
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