The total US garbage production in 2016 was 254 million tons[1]. If you assume that compacted garbage has about the density of water(hard to find good figures f

The total US garbage production in 2016 was 254 million tons[1]. If you assume that compacted garbage has about the density of water(hard to find good figures for this), then all of the garbage for the US for one year can be fit into a space of about 2.30E+08 cubic meters. This works out to a square mile, 300ft thick. A huge pile of trash and would be large to walk around it on a human scale, but geologically an almost infinitesimal amount of the Earth surface. I would say that current US farmland is about as destructive to the natural environment as a properly designed covered landfill, give or take. With about 1.5 million square miles of farmland in the US, landfill use for a hundred years of US dumping is about 15,000 times less of a problem than farming for the environment. Garbage is very visible and a visceral expression of humans impact on the planet, but farming, ranching, and housing uses of land are the real destroyers of the natural environment, not how we dispose of all the crap we make (in the US at least). [1] https://www.treehugger.com/environmental-policy/trash-numbers-startling-statistics-about-americans-and-their-garbage.html https://www.treehugger.com/environmental-policy/trash-number...