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> well regulated landfills are actually fine and there is plenty of space for them. On the other hand, a quick Google search turns up quotes like "the US is on

• Baader-Meinhof 4y ago
  I think that is just referring to the existing landfills. We can/do build new landfills all the time. And there is no shortage of unused space for new landfills.
  • midoridensha 4y ago
    Exactly. We can build the next one next to your home.
• gonzo41 4y ago
  It's always a willpower issue. If the US needed a fighter bomber range it could find the land etc etc. Whilst the US has a lot of people. its also really big. It's got space to solve this problem.
  • midoridensha 4y ago
    Unless you build the landfill in the remote western deserts, it's going to be in someone's backyard, which means condemning them and their kids to all kinds of health problems. And shipping solid waste halfway across the country simply isn't economically feasible. How many Americans are willing to pay hundreds of dollars a month for their trash service?
    • eloff 4y ago
      The US is huge and most of it is sparsely populated. There is no shortage of space. People from actual, tiny, crowded countries must find you guys hilarious.
      • midoridensha 4y ago
        There's no shortage of space very far from where people live, sure. Do you really think that shipping vast amounts of trash across the country can be done that cheaply? Building new landfills in the eastern states will necessarily mean building them in someone's backyard. There's no place in the eastern states that is truly unpopulated.
        • Dylan16807 4y ago
          There's plenty of places where a landfill is only going to bother 20 households, and it would be easy to give them a million dollars to compensate if that was necessary.
          • eloff 4y ago
            Better yet, buy their land and you have your buffer zone.
        • bombcar 4y ago
          The US makes 285 million tons of garbage a year. A coal train carries 13500 tons of coal. So that would be 21111 trains a year, or 50 trains a day - if we moved ALL the garbage. The stretch between North Platte and O'Fallons, NE is the busiest main freight line in the US, seeing about 120-140 UP trains a day. So we can do it. We could train all the US garbage somewhere. We have the power.
        • eloff 4y ago
          Even New York is mostly empty. Have you ever been out of the city? I think the problem is you're assuming that the population must be zero. But it's quite possible to purchase a large tract of rural land with little agricultural value, nobody living nearby, and good ground water conditions and build a landfill there.
          • midoridensha 4y ago
            I think you're completely overestimating how much land is available in eastern states with "nobody living nearby". I've never seen any such land, at all. There's always someone living there. Go look up the population of any county in any east-coast state; it's not zero. You're also completely overestimating the amount of rural land with "little agricultural value" in the eastern states; any such land is usually a wetland, and protected for good reason. The only places I've ever seen with "nobody living nearby" were in western states: Utah, Arizona, etc. It's not economical to ship trash from NY to AZ.
    • briHass 4y ago
      By that argument, nobody better live in dense urban cities, because there, almost 100% of the waste has to be trucked long distances to find somewhere it can actually be buried. Trash service -- whether paid directly (as in the suburbs) or rolled into taxes (as in the city) -- frequently isn't cheap. It's usually somewhere around $50/month, for basic, once-a-week pickup of a large rolling can that holds 2-3 'contractor'/32 gallon bags of trash.' Trash collection employees also make pretty decent money, for manual labor (as they should.)
      • midoridensha 4y ago
        >By that argument, nobody better live in dense urban cities, because there, almost 100% of the waste has to be trucked long distances to find somewhere it can actually be buried. Sorry, no: trash from any American city is trucked a relatively short distance to a nearby landfill. It might be a county or two away (i.e., not exactly next door), but it certainly isn't half a continent away.
• Tycho 4y ago
  That’s so obviously not true. Come on.
• golemotron 4y ago
  > a quick Google search turns up quotes like "the US is on pace to run out of room in landfills within 18 years" People talk about fake news, but this sort of stuff (which is fake news also) damages credibility immensely.
  • nickpinkston 4y ago
    There's a sizeable part of the environmental movement (collapsik / degrowthers) that like to create and spread this kind of FUD and propaganda, which is a shame because environmental issues are very real / important, and we don't need idiots making up anything to support the cause. There's plenty of evidence everywhere, though not all of it supports their Neo-Malthusian impulse, which is their true pain and cause.
  • colechristensen 4y ago
    The reason why “fake news” caught on so well is that so much of the news is indeed actually bullshit. Usually shocking sounding things which are half true at best. I bet you could come up with a statistic that says the landfills will be full. I also bet that this is a problem which will be solved in it’s time. Local man has no idea what he’s going to have for lunch next Saturday! …so?
    • bombcar 4y ago
      We’ve had 10-20 years of landfill space ever since I can remember- certainly more than 20 years ago. Guess what! Nobody builds a landfill for the fun of it, so they wait until they need one.
• strken 4y ago
  When you run out of space in a landfill you send some engineers and excavator operators out and dig a new one. The three reasons not to do that, as given by your article, are (paraphrasing) "permits and environmental regulations take a long time," "communities don't like it," and "it's bad for the environment." If the rubbish starts piling up, in the US or elsewhere, then all three of those issues are going to be quickly ignored in favour of digging another hole and adding the bare minimum of leachate collection.
• whywhywhydude 4y ago
  Your comment makes me wonder if people just haven’t had a chance to travel within the US. Except for the coastal cities, for the most part, US is empty.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    There’s a difference in west empty and east empty. Out west you get miles and miles of literally empty desert - back east you get miles and miles of sparsely populated areas, but still houses every mile or so.
• gruez 4y ago
  Probably the former, given the hysteria about running out of landfill space was partially the reason why there was a push to recycle in the 80s. >GONZALEZ: There were all these stats coming out at the time that showed that the number of landfills in America was plummeting. Landfills were closing, and people kept citing these stats in stories about the garbage barge. >KINNAMAN: And so people put it all together, and in their minds, the conclusion was that the United States is running out of landfill space. The United States was full - that we couldn't store any more. >[...] >GONZALEZ: OK. Here's what else was happening at the time. Yes, landfills were closing, but that was because there were new rules for landfills - stricter rules to protect the environment. The EPA said you now have to do things like line the bottom of landfills with plastic so they don't contaminate the groundwater. >KINNAMAN: And so the old town dump - every little town had one - was out of compliance. You can't accept garbage in here anymore. It's illegal. And so these town dumps were closing by the dozens. >GONZALEZ: But in their place, regional landfills were becoming a thing - bigger landfills that could accept trash while still following all of these new rules. The Natural Resources Defense Council says there used to be about 10,000 dumps in the mid-'80s and that now we have less than 3,000. But we were not running out of space then, and we still aren't running out of space. Thomas says we probably have thousands of years of landfill space left in the U.S. And even hardcore environmentalists reluctantly agree that, yeah, we have a lot of space left. But people thought we were running out of space, and that was what mattered. >KINNAMAN: And so the recycling era was born. This is when state government said, we're going to require cycling to - recycling to occur.
  • metadat 4y ago
    Excavated the reference: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/739893511 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/739893511