You’d have a lot less to bury if you burned it first, right?
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Where land is available, landfills are cheaper to operate. Landfills do not actually take up much land. There is some misconception that land fills are some vast areas of land filled with rubbish. In fact, land fills usually take up, at most, a very small percentage of total land use.
For the US, for example, it is estimated that landfills take up 2,000,000 acres in total. Sounds like a lot until it is put into perspective that the US land area is 2,400,000,000 acres. Landfills consists, therefore, of less than 0.1% of the total land available.
Burning trash cannot be done using a simple fire. The furnace has to be at 2,000 degrees F or so to minimize the formation of toxic fumes. This, of course, requires a fair amount of energy and capital. Of course, it is also possible to recover some of that heat to heat water or produce electricity. Nonetheless, incinerators tend to be expensive to run.
So it is a tradeoff. For certain municipalities an incinerator makes sense, in others they don’t.
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