I, for one, have never understood the problem with landfills. There's tons of unused space left, and landfills take up a tiny fraction of that. Who cares if we make a trash hill somewhere and styrofoam sits there for a million years?
There is room for improvement but I'm pretty ok with modern landfills. Methane capture IMO is the biggest lack. It's such a waste to let it pollute the atmosphere (at 30x the GHG potential of CO2) when you can capture it, scrub it and burn it for energy. Google says landfill gases account for about 10% of global GHG emissions.
(That's in North America, probably most of the world has woefully inadequate waste management solutions.)
It's clear there's not enough thought and resources going into preventing environmental problems but IMO landfills are not at the top of the list.
> I've recently move to the Netherlands from the UK and was amazed to discover they don't recycle household metal items
Wikipedia says metal cans are separated from regular trash (at the plant) to be recycled. It also says recycling in handled by municipalities so YMMV.
Regarding your early point, obviously there is a industry built around waste disposal - but the problem is still that we are creating types of waste that are destined for landfill. The fact there is this option to put it in the ground is a barrier to solutions for how we package our products, which chemicals we use, what we actively recycle etc.
Says the person who doesn't have to live near a landfill.
http://www.mountainview.gov/depts/pw/landfill.asp
I only mean to point out that although it may not be "allowed in the present," these problems last a lot longer than it takes for humans to move in to the area, or write new laws.
Events early in Shoreline's history had a problem with the lawn catching fire due to the uncontrolled seepage of methane from under the lawn (as a decay biproduct). Sort of the "everybody-hold-up-your-lighter-for-mood" effect, but uncontrolled.
But sometimes producing new paper must be beneficial.
Then when its filled you put a layer of plastic and soil on the top to stop water from getting in.
Its not perfect, but it seems to be ok. Nothing rots in there since there is hardly any moisture and the off gassing is who knows what (sometimes they burn it, so it has some methane).
There is also the problem that the trash can get spilled all over the environment during storms.
That assumes landfills are hermetically sealed systems, they are not. We have plenty of examples where landfills contaminated the groundwater and with it large swaths of ground. It's an irresponsible practice that's pretty much based on the naive principle of "out of sight out of mind".
If the goal is to recycle it's far more advantageous to actually recycle and not mix all the garbage in a giant mess, just to hide it in some hole in the ground. That makes the job of recycling just that much more difficult because you have to pick all the stuff apart and make sure you got everything out of the ground.
The old "dumps" had this problem. Modern landfills with liners, leachate management, etc. are probably the best way to handle garbage, out of all the possible options. It's simply not possible or even practical to recycle everything.
I also never said anything about recycling everything, but at least putting some effort into recycling would already go a long way. According to EPA data [1], the majority of municipal waste disposed of in US landfills is made up of organic materials: 29% paper and paperboard, 27% yard trimmings and food scraps. That's 56% of the landfill of which much could be recycled instead of just being dumped, with composting people can even recycle some of that stuff themselves at home and get some quality fertilizer out of it.
The only thing stopping this from happening is the laziness of people who rather want to dump all their garbage into a single bin/bag and be done with it because waste separation is not considered "practical", even tho there are plenty of countries who've practiced it very successfully for years already and as such are leading the "recycling race"[2].
[0]http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/La-Mi/Landfills-Impact-on-G...
[1]https://archive.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/web/pdf/ms...
[2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2016/03/04/the-co...
They're disgusting.
In Victoria, BC they've taken that buffer around their landfill and built some pretty great mountain bike trails. Whenever I'm out there I always go for a ride at the dump.
As for grinding it, that's a question of whether the space saved by grinding up the wood is worth it versus just digging/finding a bigger hole.