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."

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

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.

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

> 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.

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.

Landfills replacement a tiny volume and can be mined long term. It’s mostly organic matter that’s going to turn into coal and oil eventually but there plenty of more useful elements like copper in the mix.

I'm continually amazed at how popular the concept of mining landfills for resources is in this forum, while at the same time recycling is regularly dismissed as wishful thinking.

Perhaps it just needs rebranded as pre-emptive landfill mining?

Many forms of post consumer recycling are not worth it today with both streams often ending in the same landfills. That’s the only objection I have to recycling.

But, in a thousand or even a million years the atoms will still be around. Basically we may find this stuff useless, but that does not mean it’s permanently devoid of value. If nothing else archeology often involves going through trash heaps from ages past.

"When people in the future are so screwed that they'll take whatever they can get, they can..."

Not unlike how people recycle ships and electronics right now

It's super duper shitty ore, basically useless.

Until someone creates a machine that can pulverise anything into a fine powder and progressively sort each granule into their constituent metal, plastic, silica and organic type.

You use that machine on better ore.

That doesn’t make chemical sense. There is a huge energetic cost to smelting ore to remove the oxides, vs. landfill material that is exactly what you need but just needs to be sorted and cleaned.

The concentrations of valuable materials in the landfill are minuscule. It doesn't make energy sense to sort it even though the fractions are relatively ready to use.

Use it on landfill and you get to mine many desirable materials in one place.

Or recyclables.

There are places that run their entire waste stream through a recovery plant:

http://waste-technology.co.uk/what-is-a-dirty-mrf-and-why-th...

A substantial portion of the waste stream is just organic material (which is worth very little).

On a literal sense no less

Is it the correct solution, if it allows us to spend effort and money migrating our energy mix away from fossil fuels?

Is it the correct solution, if we have already shifted our economies to carbon-neutral or -negative modes?

These are very different situations, and we only have time and money to focus on so many things at once.

Remember all that same stuff was taken out of the earth at one point.

Actually, no. You might say this about metals, for example, but nature does not produce the sort of high-energy low-information hydrocarbon chains that comprise nearly all plastics. Inserting massive quantities of manmade endocrine disruptors into the earth is massively disruptive.