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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.