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I think there is a misconception that landfill is bad because it used to actually be bad many decades ago. Now there is a lot of regulation around what is requi

I think there is a misconception that landfill is bad because it used to actually be bad many decades ago. Now there is a lot of regulation around what is required to build a landfill site, and a lot more technical knowledge on how to do it safely. This is a pattern I see occasionally where folks learn something when they are young, and repeat it long past when it ceases to be true, never noticing that it has become a falsehood. It’s a different issue in countries with less land (Japan being the most extreme one) where landfill is just too expensive because land is expensive. But the US has lots of unused and cheap land that nobody would notice if you added a well-run landfill to.

esperent 6y ago
It depends where in the world you live. I live in Vietnam and a couple of weeks ago they burnt the entire local landfill site because it was too full (for a city of about 200,000 people, took about 4 days to burn). Now, I'm pretty sure that's not government policy here and probably illegal... But that doesn't change the fact that for a lot of the world, that's still how landfill works.
- FooHentai 6y ago
  In March 2019 storm water released 135 tonnes of rubbish from a landfill on the west coast of NZ, spreading it across a 64km area of otherwise natural beauty. It was touch-and-go on declaring it a national disaster but in the end it wasn't, and it fell to volunteers to clean up the surface evidence of the spill, at least what hadn't made it down the fox river and out to sea. Quite a bit more of that kind of thing expected with the increase in extreme weather events from climate change. In Westland alone there are another 12 at-risk old landfill sites. It's estimated that the cost of preventing further spills from the one already-open landfill alone is ~2.3M. In an economically depressed region like Westland it won't be funded, and they're far from the only region in NZ that's facing this problem. Just the first to have experienced a spill event.
  - theptip 6y ago
    I think cleaning up old sites should be prioritized; this is kind of the same commons maintenance as decommissioning old nuclear reactors. Unfortunately the purely-for-profit structure of these long-term ventures can mean that there is no money to cover the cleanup if things go really wrong, depending on who owns the site. I think you need to look at some sort of cleanup fund in escrow as a precondition for building sites like this, which should incentivize improvements in safety measures too.
    - FooHentai 6y ago
      For sure, I’ve argued for an equivalent of the superfund for NZ previously, and to bring it to bear on site remediations such as this. It’s not a perfect model, but heck it’s better than doing things ad-hoc and asking for point funding, turning things that should have been foreseen and managed over the long term into unpleasant sudden surprises.
- theptip 6y ago
  Absolutely. This is one of the big problems with recycling as currently implemented in the US; it’s based on shipping our waste to countries with much worse waste-handling practices.
  - esperent 6y ago
    Not just recycling but rubbish too, often disguised as recycling.
bladewolf47 6y ago
I agree and my views have been influenced by this post I found on HN bit more than a year ago https://medium.com/@robertwiblin/what-you-think-about-landfill-and-recycling-is-probably-totally-wrong-3a6cf57049ce https://medium.com/@robertwiblin/what-you-think-about-landfi... For reference this was the discussion that happened around it on HN then https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20433851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20433851

esperent 6y ago

It depends where in the world you live. I live in Vietnam and a couple of weeks ago they burnt the entire local landfill site because it was too full (for a city of about 200,000 people, took about 4 days to burn). Now, I'm pretty sure that's not government policy here and probably illegal... But that doesn't change the fact that for a lot of the world, that's still how landfill works.

FooHentai 6y ago
In March 2019 storm water released 135 tonnes of rubbish from a landfill on the west coast of NZ, spreading it across a 64km area of otherwise natural beauty. It was touch-and-go on declaring it a national disaster but in the end it wasn't, and it fell to volunteers to clean up the surface evidence of the spill, at least what hadn't made it down the fox river and out to sea. Quite a bit more of that kind of thing expected with the increase in extreme weather events from climate change. In Westland alone there are another 12 at-risk old landfill sites. It's estimated that the cost of preventing further spills from the one already-open landfill alone is ~2.3M. In an economically depressed region like Westland it won't be funded, and they're far from the only region in NZ that's facing this problem. Just the first to have experienced a spill event.
- theptip 6y ago
  I think cleaning up old sites should be prioritized; this is kind of the same commons maintenance as decommissioning old nuclear reactors. Unfortunately the purely-for-profit structure of these long-term ventures can mean that there is no money to cover the cleanup if things go really wrong, depending on who owns the site. I think you need to look at some sort of cleanup fund in escrow as a precondition for building sites like this, which should incentivize improvements in safety measures too.
  - FooHentai 6y ago
    For sure, I’ve argued for an equivalent of the superfund for NZ previously, and to bring it to bear on site remediations such as this. It’s not a perfect model, but heck it’s better than doing things ad-hoc and asking for point funding, turning things that should have been foreseen and managed over the long term into unpleasant sudden surprises.
theptip 6y ago
Absolutely. This is one of the big problems with recycling as currently implemented in the US; it’s based on shipping our waste to countries with much worse waste-handling practices.
- esperent 6y ago
  Not just recycling but rubbish too, often disguised as recycling.

bladewolf47 6y ago

I agree and my views have been influenced by this post I found on HN bit more than a year ago https://medium.com/@robertwiblin/what-you-think-about-landfill-and-recycling-is-probably-totally-wrong-3a6cf57049ce https://medium.com/@robertwiblin/what-you-think-about-landfi... For reference this was the discussion that happened around it on HN then https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20433851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20433851