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.

>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.

>"Yes, we have all heard of the extreme hyperbole surrounding it, such as calling it a "continent.""

And don't forget to mention the stock-image that most fear-mongering articles regarding this topic use. It's usually an entire image filled with plastic trash that's floating above murky-dark water. It grabs peoples' attention, but misrepresents the extent of the problem by evoking forced emotion on individuals who think that there is quite literally "a floating island/continent of plastic trash in the ocean somewhere". Sadly, a lot of environmental issues are dealt with like this, with fear mongering rather than objective and calm discussions.

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.

Paper decomposes so fast it's ridiculous to be concerned with the space it takes up in a landfill. There is nothing to worry about with paper.

Also, "a few square miles of landfill"? Maybe you're talking about a different country, but the US has such an enormous amount of land with low population density, we could spend hundreds of square miles on landfill, and you know what? Landfills aren't permanent! They turn into just land. Land you could use for: a landfill. It doesn't take an ever increasing amount of landfill to deal with garbage.

Paper doesn't decompose at all once its covered with soil. Landfills last for centuries. Archaeologists love digging them up. Read up on it.

>"groundwater plume that destroys wells and makes soil toxic for 20 miles 'downwind'. Did we do it wrong? Who does it right?"

I'm not a big expert on this. But this sounds like a big lesson (possibly one that could have been guessed prior). That you can apply to the next landfill: Move it to the middle of nowhere, perhaps a desert or something if you're worried about populated areas.

But if we can only use space in the middle of nowhere, it becomes much less "nearly limitless".

In fact, it becomes much more limitless. Almost everywhere in the united states is in the middle of nowhere. We could be talking about a different country, sure. But nobody says the garbage has to end up right where it's generated.

Its easy for the folks who live in cities to imagine everywhere else is just wasted ground, the middle of nowhere. Come out here sometime and learn. Every place is owned, farmed, grazed, used by somebody. There's no such thing as nowhere.

The US government owns 28% of the land in the country (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_lands) - Most of this land is not being used for parks or any other public resource - it simply is unused and unoccupied.

Much is leased for grazing, mining.

> 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.

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.

...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.

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://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-14-527_en.htm http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-28802646

Cool! If only electronics were concentrated somehow in a landfill, instead of thinly spread around.

What? Why would the material be distributed thinly? It's not like they rake it all over the desert. It's extremely concentrated.

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.

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.

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.

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.