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As clickbait, I have to applaud the author. tl;dr: As a sustainable (heh!) solution to the current waste crisis, landfilling everything is not a good solution.
by rikroots 7y ago
As clickbait, I have to applaud the author.
tl;dr: As a sustainable (heh!) solution to the current waste crisis, landfilling everything is not a good solution. We tried it for many centuries and are still paying the price for that approach today. The only people who will benefit from a 'landfill everything' strategy will be 23rd century archaeologists.
As the UK is mentioned a couple of times in the article, I'll add a link to the Wikipedia article on UK National Waste Strategies, as it includes links to the various strategies published by various Governments across the UK since 2000 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Waste_Strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Waste_Strategy
While those documents are a bit on the long side, they are very informative about the many, many (many!) complex systems that contribute to planning for, managing, and attempting to reduce waste in a large, rich European nation state.
(Disclaimer: I was part of the team that developed and published the Waste Strategy for England in 2000).
- cperciva 7y agoWe tried it for many centuries and are still paying the price for that approach today. Can you elaborate on this? I'm not aware of centuries-old landfills clogging up the landscape and (to any meaningful extent) impinging upon the availability of land.
- rikroots 7y agoHappily. Old landfill sites are not built to modern standards and are thus liable to erode, with the potential to contaminate the surrounding areas with a range of interesting toxins. They can also collapse (if they contained a significant amount of biodegradable waste) which is unfortunate if your house is built on top of it. A quick Google search gave me this link to some ongoing research conducted by Queen Mary College, London, into the risks surrounding historic landfills - https://www.qmul.ac.uk/geog/research/research-projects/historiclandfill/ https://www.qmul.ac.uk/geog/research/research-projects/histo... - that page does a far better job of explaining the situation than I can.
- cperciva 7y agoOk, but isn't the answer to "old landfill sites are not built to modern standards" that new landfill sites should be built to modern standards?
- celeritascelery 7y agoExactly. It’s like saying that old sewage systems were not built to modern standards and that led to disease transmission. Therefore sewage systems are bad. That is the whole point of “modern standards”.
- rikroots 7y agoThere will always be a need for landfill sites. And the current standards for their construction, use and end-of-life maintenance are vastly higher than they were 20 years ago. Sadly, making sure operational/new landfill sites stick to the standards doesn't fix the problems surrounding old/abandoned landfill sites. If people want to make those sites safe(r), then that's going to cost a lot of money.
- 01100011 7y agoLandfills are highly concentrated stores of resources. Why would future archaeologists be the only ones interested in them?
- rikroots 7y agoI went Googling for an answer to refute your statement and came across this article from Science Daily - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180323090958.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180323090958.h... - that supports your argument. In my view, the key barriers to landfill mining are the same as those faced by today's recycling industry: the costs involved in extracting value from waste (someone has to pay the pickers working in the recycling sheds - possibly one of the worst jobs in the world); and finding viable, stable and sustainable markets for the materials that do get extracted. Volatile recyclate markets were a huge problem for sustainable recycling back in 2000 and I doubt much has changed since then.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dev_tty01 7y agoThe author is not suggesting that we use landfills built to old standards.