Eventually, robots will go through all of the landfills and recover a lot of the materials in it.
And they might get all the energy they need to do it from the garbage itself. Hey, if insects can do it, robots will eventually be able to do it.
And they might get all the energy they need to do it from the garbage itself. Hey, if insects can do it, robots will eventually be able to do it.
What is the energy potential in the materials in a landfill? How much is wasted by scouring them and trying to properly extract it? Compared to preventing the capture of those materials there in the first place?
Putting the survival of our species on the possibility of some pixie dust is not rational. It is hard to face the truth, but burying your head in the sand is counter-productive.
If certain resources do get more sparse, it will easily become economically viable to expand landfill mining and we already have the technology required to do so. At the end of the day, it's an energy question more than anything. With cheap solar plus the fact that landfills produce their own free energy (methane) there is no need to be alarmist and consider them a threat to our species.
Wall-E was solar powered and was just supposed to compact trash for incineration.
Taking care of the best planet around is always going to be easier and better than packing everybody off to some other planet, even one that's just as good.
They way I see it, it's even going to be possible to even collect all the mercury out of the ocean and clean up other seemingly impossible messes.