Landfills

[sunsunsun]

I have started looking into the subject of garbage dumps/landfills, and am surprised that such a concept exists as it does in the current year.

The town I live in is basically built on dumps and around dumps. There are certain parts of town where they covered up a landfill and built buildings on top of. They had to use deep piling to make a foundation to burrow through the garbage piles into the ground and then install vents to let the methane produced from rotting garbage escape. Now every time they build on the area they have to do environmental and stability assessments. It's crazy to just cover up garbage and build on top of it.

There are more landfills in operation. One is next to a "high-end" subdivision, there is one more on the Indian reserve, and there's another one somewhere else. I have looked into landfill practices in other cities/towns and am amazed at what I've been seeing. I was considering moving to a semi-high altitude mountain town and it turns out the town landfill is built uphill from the town and is leaching fermented garbage juice into the city and water supply and also on windy days garbage gets tossed around onto the neighbour's land. People literally live right next to it. A few months ago someone dropped off some chemical containers and the person driving the bulldozer machine got sick after rolling over the canisters and getting exposed to whatever was in there.

There are projects that do "landfill mining" which is extracting the garbage and processing it and sorting out and recycling things. This is extremely filthy and there are issues with toxic things that were dumped into the landfill contaminating stuff but overall it's a pretty good solution.

A lot of stuff can be recycled, it just isn't. Carpets made of petroleum based textiles can actually be separated into their components and remade into other products. Like 95% of a typical suburban tract home that Is architecturally worthless otherwise can be deconstructed and recycled, it's just that people are too cheap/poor and facilities don't exist and local city councils don't make enough strong laws to nudge people into doing these things because the plebs who already cry about taxes nearly constantly would cry about the added cost even though it means making the place a nicer place to live.

It is overall irresponsible to build or renovate homes with excessive hard-to-recycle materials. Easily biodegradable alternatives exist for many things. People with no taste or sense of style are more likely to not care about this stuff, though.

I support eco-fascism. What I mean by that is some people will have to be threatened with state-sanctioned violence to comply with recycling and care for the environment. At the same time, I think fossil fuels are not as not-renewable as the mainstream says. There is evidence that oil is produced in a different method than fermenting organic flora and fauna. There is actually a scientific paper showing some hydrocarbons can be made just from minerals and intense heat and pressure.

[dapose]

@sunsunsun I think mycelium can digest just about anything. But living on top of a compost pile can’t be too healthy! Plant a forest and use a negative ion generator in your home.

[Atman]

Interesting topic.

I am bit torn between an eco-fascist stance like yourself and a laissez-faire approach. Because on one hand I think some unquestionable dangerous pollution is just unnecessary and just a consequence of peoples ignorance, egotism and laziness.
On the other hand I think some environmentalists make too much a fuzz about it and consider garbage like some evil, alien substance which must not have any contact with the "natural" environment. I mean in the end, this stuff came from the earth and humans have just transformed it into a new state which is in some instances toxic for some type of organisms for some time, but the idea that we are able to do some irreversible damage to nature in this way, is human hubris in my opinion.
Regarding the alternative theories about so called fossil fuels, you can look into the book "The deep hot biosphere", which was mentioned by Peat on several occasions.