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I don't know if you read any of the article - it doesn't sound like it - but I'd be interested to hear your response to some of its claims. Mainly, sure, Earth

I don't know if you read any of the article - it doesn't sound like it - but I'd be interested to hear your response to some of its claims. Mainly, sure, Earth is like a space ship, but waste disposal is not like cleaning the oxygen system. You take all your garbage, bury it in a landfill, and problem solved. We have nearly limitless space to bury garbage, and when it comes time, we can bury garbage in old landfill sites. That is, for anything that isn't rare or hazardous. So what do you have to say about that? I'm curious because I do recycle all I reasonably can, but it sounds like that isn't really helpful.

admax88q 11y ago
> we can bury garbage in old landfill sites. How's that going to work? Landfills don't decompose. In fact many of them are treated not to, since people don't like the smell and they don't want toxic stuff getting in to the water table. Landfills literally just sit there. Forever.
- jaderobbins1 11y ago
  So eventually when the cost of finding/creating new materials makes recycling economically feasible we "mine" old landfills and use the materials. The landfill materials become the new raw material for manufacture.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    ...except that they distribute the material so thinly, its unlikely it'll ever be economical to mine. Even the 'original' mines e.g. copper, iron, need very high mineral densities to make them worthwhile. Landfills are orders of magnitude less dense.
    - garfij 11y ago
      There is more gold in a ton of garbage electronics than there is in a ton of gold ore. http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs060-01/fs060-01.pdf http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs060-01/fs060-01.pdf http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-14-527_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-14-527_en.htm http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-28802646 http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-28802646
      - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        Cool! If only electronics were concentrated somehow in a landfill, instead of thinly spread around.
    - vectorjohn 11y ago
      What? Why would the material be distributed thinly? It's not like they rake it all over the desert. It's extremely concentrated.
      - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        Concentrated ore is essentially solid material of a single nature. Nothing resembling that occurs in landfills. Its a big pile of 'stuff' with pellets of interesting materials every few meters. That's many orders of magnitude too sparse to be worth mechanically mining.
- vectorjohn 11y ago
  Of course landfills decompose, that's an absurd assertion. If they're treated not to decompose, then they were put in the wrong place obviously. Clearly some things in the landfill don't decompose, but like others have pointed out, they will someday become profitable to mine if they're full of so much concentrated stuff.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Read up on landfills. There's little or no effort to make them decompose. Impermeable soil layers are deposited to expressly prevent mixing and mulching, since that would allow contaminated water to travel from layer to layer.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Under the narrow definition of garbage provided (household waste), and using the system of imaginary points (what is cheaper instead of what costs our environment more), then sure that's the conclusion the OP came up with. After endless fables and allegories and precious little actual numbers. The idea that we cut thousands of acres of wood a year to make paper, yet somehow the garbage will fit in a smaller space is on the surface preposterous. That landfills are any kind of solution is also very debatable. They poison the area around for generations. My local town, very PC and very educated, has a massive landfill groundwater plume that destroys wells and makes soil toxic for 20 miles 'downwind'. Did we do it wrong? Who does it right? You've heard about the 'plastic continent' circling in the ocean, made of a soup of plastic waste that's never going to go away? Do we count those thousands of square miles in the 'landfill equation'? We have endless space, sure, as long as we're willing to consume it in those ways. Ecology to burn! We'll never need it, surely. Certainly we won't miss it, its outside of town and nobody goes there.
- mason240 11y ago
  >You've heard about the 'plastic continent' circling in the ocean, made of a soup of plastic waste that's never going to go away? Do we count those thousands of square miles in the 'landfill equation'? Yes, we have all heard of the extreme hyperbole surrounding it, such as calling it a "continent." >The idea that we cut thousands of acres of wood a year to make paper, Paper has been grown a crop using fast growing, poplar-like trees for decades now. In fact, we have tens of thousands of acres of paper trees that will never be harvested because email caused the demand for paper to plummet.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Hyperbole notwithstanding, its an enormous volume of ecology impacted by garbage. The words exaggerate the mass of the thing (its like 1 piece of garbage per cubic foot of water) but not the extent of it. The tree thing was about the space it takes to dispose of it all, not the cutting of the trees. That a few square miles of landfill will be enough for 1000 years for everybody is a laughable notion.
SimpleXYZ 11y ago
With the exception of aluminum, consumer recycling is total nonsense. (Industrial recycling is extremely important and profitable.) Putting recyclables on an oil burning truck to an oil burning processing plant is dubious at best.

admax88q 11y ago

> we can bury garbage in old landfill sites. How's that going to work? Landfills don't decompose. In fact many of them are treated not to, since people don't like the smell and they don't want toxic stuff getting in to the water table. Landfills literally just sit there. Forever.

jaderobbins1 11y ago
So eventually when the cost of finding/creating new materials makes recycling economically feasible we "mine" old landfills and use the materials. The landfill materials become the new raw material for manufacture.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  ...except that they distribute the material so thinly, its unlikely it'll ever be economical to mine. Even the 'original' mines e.g. copper, iron, need very high mineral densities to make them worthwhile. Landfills are orders of magnitude less dense.
  - garfij 11y ago
    There is more gold in a ton of garbage electronics than there is in a ton of gold ore. http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs060-01/fs060-01.pdf http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs060-01/fs060-01.pdf http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-14-527_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-14-527_en.htm http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-28802646 http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-28802646
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Cool! If only electronics were concentrated somehow in a landfill, instead of thinly spread around.
  - vectorjohn 11y ago
    What? Why would the material be distributed thinly? It's not like they rake it all over the desert. It's extremely concentrated.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Concentrated ore is essentially solid material of a single nature. Nothing resembling that occurs in landfills. Its a big pile of 'stuff' with pellets of interesting materials every few meters. That's many orders of magnitude too sparse to be worth mechanically mining.
vectorjohn 11y ago
Of course landfills decompose, that's an absurd assertion. If they're treated not to decompose, then they were put in the wrong place obviously. Clearly some things in the landfill don't decompose, but like others have pointed out, they will someday become profitable to mine if they're full of so much concentrated stuff.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Read up on landfills. There's little or no effort to make them decompose. Impermeable soil layers are deposited to expressly prevent mixing and mulching, since that would allow contaminated water to travel from layer to layer.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

Under the narrow definition of garbage provided (household waste), and using the system of imaginary points (what is cheaper instead of what costs our environment more), then sure that's the conclusion the OP came up with. After endless fables and allegories and precious little actual numbers. The idea that we cut thousands of acres of wood a year to make paper, yet somehow the garbage will fit in a smaller space is on the surface preposterous. That landfills are any kind of solution is also very debatable. They poison the area around for generations. My local town, very PC and very educated, has a massive landfill groundwater plume that destroys wells and makes soil toxic for 20 miles 'downwind'. Did we do it wrong? Who does it right? You've heard about the 'plastic continent' circling in the ocean, made of a soup of plastic waste that's never going to go away? Do we count those thousands of square miles in the 'landfill equation'? We have endless space, sure, as long as we're willing to consume it in those ways. Ecology to burn! We'll never need it, surely. Certainly we won't miss it, its outside of town and nobody goes there.

mason240 11y ago
>You've heard about the 'plastic continent' circling in the ocean, made of a soup of plastic waste that's never going to go away? Do we count those thousands of square miles in the 'landfill equation'? Yes, we have all heard of the extreme hyperbole surrounding it, such as calling it a "continent." >The idea that we cut thousands of acres of wood a year to make paper, Paper has been grown a crop using fast growing, poplar-like trees for decades now. In fact, we have tens of thousands of acres of paper trees that will never be harvested because email caused the demand for paper to plummet.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Hyperbole notwithstanding, its an enormous volume of ecology impacted by garbage. The words exaggerate the mass of the thing (its like 1 piece of garbage per cubic foot of water) but not the extent of it. The tree thing was about the space it takes to dispose of it all, not the cutting of the trees. That a few square miles of landfill will be enough for 1000 years for everybody is a laughable notion.

SimpleXYZ 11y ago

With the exception of aluminum, consumer recycling is total nonsense. (Industrial recycling is extremely important and profitable.) Putting recyclables on an oil burning truck to an oil burning processing plant is dubious at best.