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Landfills are tiny relative to usable land and are eventually just capped and turned into parks. Most of the popular fear about running out of landfill space c

Landfills are tiny relative to usable land and are eventually just capped and turned into parks. Most of the popular fear about running out of landfill space can be traced back to a misused statistic about small rural landfills being decommissioned. RCRA Subtitle D regs basically have driven the shutdown of old town dumps. Modern landfills are much more efficient, with better safety controls for leaching and gas capture, better compression and sorting, and even processes that speed decomposition. The headlines will scream that the number of available landfills are dropping rapidly and neglect to mention that total capacity is actually up and total disposed volume has been trending down since 2000, even despite population increases. Highly recommend touring a landfill and learning about waste management at scale. There are really interesting engineering dilemmas that are always a step more nuanced than "we must use x solution or fill the world with trash."

randycupertino 7y ago
Don't landfills leech lots of pollutants into the groundwater and nearby environment?
- thirstywhimbrel 7y ago
  Efficient leachate control is an interesting area, but there are various families of techniques to do it and methods for monitoring effectiveness that have emerged from the last several decades of focused study. Current facilities are way better equipped than the old solution of uncontrolled municipal dumps.
  - xkcd-sucks 7y ago
    Still, leachate control is nothing but a cost center to the people running a landfill. It's likely that plenty of landfills are not as compliant as they report, through intention or ignorance; and when the landfill operator goes bankrupt nobody takes over the maintenance. In a sense, leachate control is the low-tar cigarette of waste disposal
    - thirstywhimbrel 7y ago
      > leachate control is nothing but a cost center to the people running a landfill A lot of these fixes are more expensive to fake to code than to just implement, and isolating sources of groundwater pollution can take a few years, but not decades. Also a lot of these people live there and know the risks to their kids' safety. The environmental engineers who consult on these projects didn't generally go into the field to poison people.
  - iforgotpassword 7y ago
    If anything, experience from the past gave the people running these things suggestions where they can most likely cut costs without the whole thing blowing up into their faces before they retire. Same with monitoring. It's costly, nothing happened the last couple years, let's just do it less thoroughly. Look at nuclear power. Might be the greatest and cleanest solution in theory. In practice, look at the revelations after Fukushima. Mismanagement, dramatically negligent maintenance, corruption. Would proper management have prevented the incident? Probably not, but it wouldn't have been nearly as bad. Without the tsunami, this might have continued for years to come and who knows how and when shit would've hit the fan in this alternate reality. Then the shitshow that is storing nuclear waste here in Germany. Again instead of listening to scientists and engineers in the end they dumped the metal containers inside an old salt mine. Big surprise, salt water lead to rapid corrosion and now they have to get that shit out again, but thankfully the tax payer cover that bullshit. Another example? 737 MAX. Yet again a story of a company that kept cutting costs over years and years until it blew up in their faces. It ticked pretty much all the boxes over the year. Cutting corners, saving costs, budget restrictions, ignoring concerns by engineers in charge, you name it. It's always the same pattern. If Apple doesn't innovate, cheaps out on components, scraps QA, their products might eventually suck so much that nobody will buy them anymore and they'll just disappear, but who cares. Nuclear isn't bad. Aviation isn't bad. Landfills aren't. But these are these kinds of industries where negligence can have catastrophic results. And especially something that is as long term as a landfill is predestined for this kind of failure.

randycupertino 7y ago

Don't landfills leech lots of pollutants into the groundwater and nearby environment?

thirstywhimbrel 7y ago
Efficient leachate control is an interesting area, but there are various families of techniques to do it and methods for monitoring effectiveness that have emerged from the last several decades of focused study. Current facilities are way better equipped than the old solution of uncontrolled municipal dumps.
- xkcd-sucks 7y ago
  Still, leachate control is nothing but a cost center to the people running a landfill. It's likely that plenty of landfills are not as compliant as they report, through intention or ignorance; and when the landfill operator goes bankrupt nobody takes over the maintenance. In a sense, leachate control is the low-tar cigarette of waste disposal
  - thirstywhimbrel 7y ago
    > leachate control is nothing but a cost center to the people running a landfill A lot of these fixes are more expensive to fake to code than to just implement, and isolating sources of groundwater pollution can take a few years, but not decades. Also a lot of these people live there and know the risks to their kids' safety. The environmental engineers who consult on these projects didn't generally go into the field to poison people.
- iforgotpassword 7y ago
  If anything, experience from the past gave the people running these things suggestions where they can most likely cut costs without the whole thing blowing up into their faces before they retire. Same with monitoring. It's costly, nothing happened the last couple years, let's just do it less thoroughly. Look at nuclear power. Might be the greatest and cleanest solution in theory. In practice, look at the revelations after Fukushima. Mismanagement, dramatically negligent maintenance, corruption. Would proper management have prevented the incident? Probably not, but it wouldn't have been nearly as bad. Without the tsunami, this might have continued for years to come and who knows how and when shit would've hit the fan in this alternate reality. Then the shitshow that is storing nuclear waste here in Germany. Again instead of listening to scientists and engineers in the end they dumped the metal containers inside an old salt mine. Big surprise, salt water lead to rapid corrosion and now they have to get that shit out again, but thankfully the tax payer cover that bullshit. Another example? 737 MAX. Yet again a story of a company that kept cutting costs over years and years until it blew up in their faces. It ticked pretty much all the boxes over the year. Cutting corners, saving costs, budget restrictions, ignoring concerns by engineers in charge, you name it. It's always the same pattern. If Apple doesn't innovate, cheaps out on components, scraps QA, their products might eventually suck so much that nobody will buy them anymore and they'll just disappear, but who cares. Nuclear isn't bad. Aviation isn't bad. Landfills aren't. But these are these kinds of industries where negligence can have catastrophic results. And especially something that is as long term as a landfill is predestined for this kind of failure.