I spent part of my vacation at a landfill. Before you laugh, just know it was a largely enjoyable experience. I actually left the beach for the landfill. You can laugh now.
Visiting the landfill made me think.
First, about the environment. Next, about the business of landfills, and then about legislation.
Now, the word “landfill” immediately brings up images from the movie “Wall-E”, where the world is overrun with waste and the earth is destroyed. I imagine it’s a similar experience for many other people.
It’s easy to rail against the modern world’s waste management systems when you view landfills as mountains of smelly diapers and toxic chemicals that are destroying the planet. I think to a certain point, that view also must assume that the people running these systems are either ignorant or willfully destroying the land for profit.
When I visited this landfill, neither of those options was the case.
First of all, the trash business isn’t glamorous. The man that started this particular landfill knew that. When he proposed to his wife, he said, “I can’t promise we’ll be rich, but everybody has trash.” Meaning, we will always have a job, and there will always be a need we can serve. Over 40+ years, they did become wealthy through the business.
The family running this landfill is selling space. So it is in their best interest to save whatever they can to either sell or give away, so they can save space in the landfill. Nothing goes in the landfill that doesn’t have to. Materials like lumber are saved and resold, and even any trees that come through are cut into planks for lumber. The industry is heavily regulated in an effort to protect the earth.
For example, this family is required to cover the surface of their landfill with ground cover plants. It’s easy to see that nature is the ultimate decomposer, and that plants help play a role in that. But they’re also required to keep that ground cover mowed to a certain height. The landfill is still a small, but steep mountain. Try running a lawnmower across the side of that thing, and you’ll be wasting money on gas and compensation for the worker that just rolled that machine over himself down the side of the hill. They could use goats, but there are also regulations about livestock in the city, and animal rights activists wouldn’t be happy to see goats eating grass from a landfill.
Another example is that landfills are required to have a thick, impermeable rubber liner separating the trash from the earth. That may seem like a good idea when you first think about protecting the water. But that could make the problem even worse, because you just created an environment where the problem will compound and organisms dangerous to human health will thrive.
Regulations like these come down from people who don’t handle this kind of stuff on a regular basis, and who don’t think through the situation.
My insights come from a background in soil biology and permaculture. I think people working day in and day out in the landfill would have even more insight for the environmental problems posed by our waste systems. Sadly, the people making the rules don’t have that experience, and their rules make a difficult situation even harder to manage.
I wonder how different the situation would be if there was no top down regulation from people far away. I think that people that were heavily involved in the landfills could collaborate with biologists and other people to come up with real solutions.
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