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Landfillin' Me Softly With His Song

Landfillin' Me Softly With His Song

Alessandra Papa
educational

In middle school and high school, I took a lot of classics courses. So many, in fact, that I got a special Classics Diploma from my high school. I’m talking 6 years of Latin, art and archaeology, lots of epic poems, and a capstone project in which I performed a Greek tragedy using only sock puppets. One of my favorite classes out of them all was an archaeology course in which the teacher actually buried a bunch of “artifacts” and we got to have a dig on campus, complete with egyptologist hats and tiny little duster brushes. As a huge nerd and hat enthusiast, this was an actual dream of mine come true. One thing we talked about over and over in that course, and in a college course I took about archaeology (because again, nerd) was how important trash is to history. An enormous amount of what we know about ancient and not-so-ancient cultures we learned by literally digging through their garbage. Trash heaps are where the remnants of everyday life wind up, and you’d be surprised about how well trash can preserve itself. Sometimes I wonder what an archaeologist could learn about my life from the trash I throw away every week. Is that normal? Actually please don’t answer. The long and the short of it is that humans create garbage; we’ve been doing it for millenia and we’re not going to stop. As time moves on, the specific items in the garbage heap have changed, but a modern day landfill isn’t wildly different than an ancient trash heap. Let’s marry two of my loves - archaeology and environmental science - and discuss just the basics of modern day municipal landfills. 

Take a look at this drawing of a landfill. There’s a liner on the bottom to keep garbage juices from leaking into the water supply, along with a few more technical layers. Then you basically just dump a bunch of trash inside and cover it over with dirt. (Each of those technical layers that I glossed over serve very important purposes, but I won’t digress here. If you are curious about the details I’d recommend checking out this website. Or, drop a comment at the end of this article - I’d be happy to write about it!) As much as landfills perform a necessary job, here are a few reasons why they can get a bad rap: they produce methane and carbon dioxide, they take up space, they’re designed to not break down the trash inside, and they have to be monitored for decades to make sure nothing nasty is getting into the water supply.

To start off, methane is not the only gas that landfills produce (experts refer to landfill gases collectively as “landfill gas” or LFG (I know, creative)) but methane is a greenhouse gas that traps much more heat than carbon dioxide. Methane does not hang around in the atmosphere for as long as carbon dioxide, but it does a lot more “damage” while it’s there. No part of nature is inherently bad, but in the context of the Troop’s wider discussion about climate change, you’re not going to see me advocate for more methane emissions, hence the negative connotations I’m using. Not only do landfills produce methane, they are the third biggest source of human-produced methane in America. There is one landfill in North Carolina that uses the methane it produces as fuel to produce power for artist studios and a gallery space, which I think is a wonderful idea! For the rest of us, the EPA has a program which helps use landfill gas to produce energy instead of flaring it - but the program is only voluntary. All landfills in America are now required to monitor the gases they produce, and many landfills choose to flare off their gas output as a way of “dealing with” LFG. Even though these gases are measured or dealt with in some capacity instead of just let loose into the atmosphere with a shrug, I think there is plenty of room for improvement in this country’s approach to LFG. 

The next reason landfills have a bad reputation is that some decomposition occurs, but not much. Unlike with composting, landfills are designed to actually minimize decomposition. You can find stories online of “garbologists” digging through landfills and still being able to read 30-40 year-old newspapers clearly. Newspaper! In my composter at home, newspaper would be readable for less than a couple weeks. As an aside - what is a garbologist but an archaeologist studying synchronous cultures? What hats do they wear? Landfill gas is a by-product of decomposition, but because there is no oxygen being introduced like there would be in composting, there’s a limited amount of decomp that can happen. That’s why you can still read the old newspapers - there’s no oxygen to feed the things that can “eat” it. And while limited decomposition does equal limited LFGs, when garbage just sits there and doesn’t decompose it continues to take up the same amount of space. So instead of being recycled and becoming something new, or being broken down to create rich soil like with composting, mountains of garbage just stay mountains of garbage. Most cities are not going to run out of space for landfills anytime soon, especially when you factor in an increase in the amount of materials we’re able to recycle. Even so, I’m still not excited to keep burying trash in the ground.

Lastly, landfills have to be monitored for decades after they’re capped to make sure that nothing harmful is leaking out into the groundwater. If something were to jeopardize a city’s supply of water, the consequences would be monumental. Although the cause would be different than in Flint, Michigan, that city serves as a foreboding example of modern life without a functioning municipal water supply. 

Now that we’ve gone through some negative aspects, let’s zoom back out to put it all into perspective. For one, landfills are absolutely necessary right now, and there are plenty of things that for better or worse need to go to a landfill instead of a recycling or compost bin. You certainly don’t need to start protesting landfills - what would an alternative to them even be? This means that for now landfills just come with their negative aspects, but we can be working to improve the design of landfills and making them greener. One option might be the EPA mandating that all landfills participate in their LFG-to-energy program.

What will be true both now and in the future is that we can all benefit from throwing fewer items into the garbage in our own homes. That’s the idea of the zero waste lifestyle - to avoid landfills at all costs through extreme recycling and the reuse of products! I’m happy to report that you don’t have to go full-on zero waste to make an impact. To reduce your waste, start by paying more attention to what you’re bringing into your home and what you’re sending out in a trash bag. For some ideas on how to evaluate what you’re bringing in, check out my articles about reducing waste in your bathroom routine and trying zero waste. This article also offers a perfect springboard for an article on fast fashion - click here to read it next. 

And whether or not you read those other articles, I think you deserve a little reward for learning about landfills. As a special treat, I present to you a screenshot of my sock puppet dramatization of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. And you thought I was lying...

sock puppet screenshot2.JPG
Fast Fashion: A Race to the Landfill

Fast Fashion: A Race to the Landfill