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I wonder if in 100-500 years they will mine landfills for materials or elements that have become scarce. Or maybe they will just keep them as natural gas react

I wonder if in 100-500 years they will mine landfills for materials or elements that have become scarce. Or maybe they will just keep them as natural gas reactors.

ants_everywhere 2y ago
they'll certainly mine them for archaeological information. that's one of the reasons I keep my trash in neat layers ordered chronologically
RandallBrown 2y ago
There's a kids sci-fi novel called The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm that talks about this a bit. There are children searching for plastic in landfills because they've run out of oil to make new plastic. Plastic bowls and things are status symbols because of how expensive plastic becomes.
ch4s3 2y ago
Probably not. I can't imagine anything we currently landfill that we're in any danger of running out of. Even rare-earth metals are quite widely dispersed and readily available. It seems more likely that we'd divert e-waste to places where materials can be recovered long before mining old trash.
nobodyknowin 2y ago
It might even be sooner than that. Once oil gets too expensive to pull out the the ground, mining plastic from landfills and decomposing it back to the hydrocarbons might end up big business. The natural gas/ ch4 production follows a pretty well known curve, at about 40-50 years it's nowhere near as potent. And with the push to keep organics out of the modern landfills that might get even worse.
- bluGill 2y ago
  We can make plastics from bio sources, or directly from elemental carbon. Oil is a lot cheaper, but we can do it. In WWII the Germans were running on synthetic gas. Last I checked you can buy synthetic gas - at about 5x the cost of standard pump gasoline. (synthetic gas has more energy per gallon so sometimes it is used in a race)
- skybrian 2y ago
  Energy has a lot of dark horse candidates and it's hard to pick winners. But one that sounds interesting to me, though it's still early, is pulling carbon directly out of the air using solar energy [1]. On basic principles, it sounds a whole lot easier than mining landfills? But that's assuming the capital costs can be lowered enough. (Solar costs keeps dropping, they figure out the other costs.) [1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/01/terraform-industries-converted-electricity-and-air-into-synthetic-natural-gas/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/01/terraform-industries-conve...

I wonder if in 100-500 years they will mine landfills for materials or elements that have become scarce. Or maybe they will just keep them as natural gas reactors.

ants_everywhere 2y ago

they'll certainly mine them for archaeological information. that's one of the reasons I keep my trash in neat layers ordered chronologically

RandallBrown 2y ago

There's a kids sci-fi novel called The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm that talks about this a bit. There are children searching for plastic in landfills because they've run out of oil to make new plastic. Plastic bowls and things are status symbols because of how expensive plastic becomes.

ch4s3 2y ago

Probably not. I can't imagine anything we currently landfill that we're in any danger of running out of. Even rare-earth metals are quite widely dispersed and readily available. It seems more likely that we'd divert e-waste to places where materials can be recovered long before mining old trash.

nobodyknowin 2y ago

It might even be sooner than that. Once oil gets too expensive to pull out the the ground, mining plastic from landfills and decomposing it back to the hydrocarbons might end up big business. The natural gas/ ch4 production follows a pretty well known curve, at about 40-50 years it's nowhere near as potent. And with the push to keep organics out of the modern landfills that might get even worse.

bluGill 2y ago
We can make plastics from bio sources, or directly from elemental carbon. Oil is a lot cheaper, but we can do it. In WWII the Germans were running on synthetic gas. Last I checked you can buy synthetic gas - at about 5x the cost of standard pump gasoline. (synthetic gas has more energy per gallon so sometimes it is used in a race)
skybrian 2y ago
Energy has a lot of dark horse candidates and it's hard to pick winners. But one that sounds interesting to me, though it's still early, is pulling carbon directly out of the air using solar energy [1]. On basic principles, it sounds a whole lot easier than mining landfills? But that's assuming the capital costs can be lowered enough. (Solar costs keeps dropping, they figure out the other costs.) [1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/01/terraform-industries-converted-electricity-and-air-into-synthetic-natural-gas/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/01/terraform-industries-conve...