The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [143]
The purpose of a landfill is to bury the trash in such a way that it will be isolated from groundwater, will be kept dry, and will not come in contact with air. If these conditions are achieved (which happens, basically, never), the trash doesn’t decompose much, which is the point. That’s the “sanitary” part. Your typical landfill takes up at least several hundred acres of land, of which maybe a third is dedicated to the actual landfill.77 (The enormous and now-closed Fresh Kills landfill on New York’s Staten Island was 2,200 acres.78) The remaining land is used for supporting services: runoff collection ponds, leachate collection ponds, drop-off stations, truck parking, and fifty-to hundred-foot buffer areas.79
So here are the problems with landfills:
1. All Landfills Leak
No matter how well engineered the landfills are, liquid ends up inside the chambers. Rain seeps in and mixes with the liquid from within the garbage (rotting food waste, nail polish remover, spoiled milk, the last bit of Windex in the bottle, etc.). It trickles through the dry trash and picks up contaminants (like the heavy metals in printing ink, paints, household and garden pesticides, oven cleaner, drain un-cloggers—you name it) and turns into a disgusting witches’ brew. This liquid, called leachate, can seep directly into the ground, contaminating surface water, underground water supplies, and anything else in its path. Contamination of underground water is worse than other kinds of water pollution because we can’t see it so have a hard time tracking it. We can never properly clean it up and we are likely to need it more with increasing climate change. We shouldn’t contaminate rivers either, but at least they regularly flush with fresh water. Underground aquifers, which contain one hundred times the volume of fresh water found in all the rivers and other water bodies on the earth’s surface, take thousands of years to do the same.80
To prevent this, engineers have designed collection systems—networks of pipes at the lowest part of the landfill—in an attempt to divert and collect the leachate, which then gets treated as wastewater (not unproblematic itself). But the liquid can only be collected if it doesn’t escape through the liners first, and the problem is that there are lots of things in the garbage that can puncture or erode those liners. Also, the collection pipes can get clogged or broken by the weight of all that garbage. Leachate can also overflow from the top, like an overfilled bathtub. In fact, even the EPA admits that landfill liners inevitably leak, despite the claims of landfill operators to the contrary.81
2. Landfills Are Always Toxic
In the United States our laws distinguish between hazardous and nonhaz-ardous waste, which is more of a legal differentiation than a reality.82 Landfills for hazardous waste are more strictly regulated and engineered than those limited to municipal solid waste. Unfortunately, even though it’s considered nonhazardous, municipal solid waste contains a lot of dangerous chemicals—not just from the batteries and paint cans and electronics stuck in there by folks who just don’t care enough to separate them out, but also from Stuff not yet banned from regular household trash, like flame-retardant-treated fabrics, PVC-coated cables, lead-painted toys, household cleaners, nail polish remover, etc. Even seemingly benign plastics contain toxic heavy metals as stabilizers. Researchers have found that leachate from municipal waste landfills is just as toxic as that from hazardous waste landfills. In fact, 20 percent of the top-priority contaminated sites awaiting cleanup under our national Superfund program are former municipal landfills.83
3. Landfills Foul the Air and Contribute to Climate Chaos
Pollution comes out of landfills in the form of nasty gases, too. You see, when the organic material (banana peels, yard waste, soggy pizza boxes, wilted salad, etc.) in landfills rots, it releases methane