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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why landfills are so controversial. Shit doesn't decompose there which means it doesn't find its way into the ecosystem. Undisturbed in a big pile underground is a great place for all sorts of other nasty things.

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There are better landfill technologies from Japan[1][2], Shanghai recently switched[3][4] to them. But they still require careful sorting of the garbage, removing dangerous and easily decomposable organic materials. So maybe it is time for the US to learn from Japan?

[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2017/02/18/environment/was...

[2] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/2019/04/29/special-supplements/...

[3] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3016801/shan...

[4] https://qz.com/1650893/japan-wants-to-become-southeast-asias...

That's a rosy picture of landfills, have you heard of the one with an underground fire approaching nuclear waste? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

There’s an area about 10 square miles around there that smells like rotten waste, perpetually. It’s crazy that there’s a bunch of business and residential development there too.

The vast majority of landfills are well run and are closely monitored.

so one had a problem, therefore they're all bad? Well, here's one battery recycling [1] plant that emitted toxins. Guess I better not recycle car batteries anymore.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exide_lead_contamination#Los_A...

It doesn't hurt putting a spotlight on issues rather than brushing them under the carpet and acting like everything is well and dandy and there's no downsides. It's a fine line.

>I don't know why landfills are so controversial.

Well, when corporations and governments say "it's properly lined and safe" and then years later the groundwater gets contaminated, people start creating controversy.

Groundwater doesn't get contaminated if it is done properly.

It's true that it is possible for it to be done badly. It seems a lot more likely that the public will care, and pressure people to make sure it is done right, if they aren't spending their energy sorting their supposed recyclables and thinking everything is taken care of.

The problem is "it's done properly" will be verified decades later, and by the time the damage is done, and there may not even be anyone to sue anymore.

You don't need to wait to verify that something is done properly. We can verify that a building is built properly without waiting to see if it falls, for instance. There is solid engineering behind modern landfills, even though the popular opinion is they are terrible things.

I huge component of the reliability of the lining is in the installation. Many things could easily go wrong such as doing a lazy job making sure the subsurface is relatively smooth, or tears happening on installation and nobody speaking up about it, or people seeing it and others saying it'll be fine either because they truly believe that or because it eats into costs to replace it. Depending on the material properties, they may also be UV sensitive and stored out in the sun, decreasing it's "shelf life". This is a common issue with PVC tubing. Many people store them outside, either unaware or ignorant to the fact that it affects the integrity of the pipe.

Yes, well, if society deems it important enough, then we put safeguards in place which includes educating the installers about UV sensitivity. (you'd think the people who engineer these systems would understand the issue and put correct processes in place, no?)

I mean, yeah, if people don't care, negligence will happen because no one is watching. But people apparently care, in fact that why so many people are bothering sorting their refuse, because of their fear of landfills destroying the planet.

well, you sort of have to wait.

There is no guarantee that the check you made while building was exhaustive.

People may not have payed attention, officers may have been bribed, certifications may not have accounted for problems that were not known at the time, unexpected geological activity may cause disruption etc.

We have a few thousand years of managing construction, and we still have bridges that collapse all over the world. Sure, it's a small percentage of the bridges we build, and we should not stop doing that.

I am not against landfills a-priori, they have their role, but considering them without issues is oversimplifying.

>The problem is "it's done properly" will be verified decades later, and by the time the damage is done, and there may not even be anyone to sue anymore.

So is nearly every other public works projects. By the time the bridge falls down the builder has had plenty of time to folds the company and cash out.

Verification during construction mostly solves this problem.

I'm not aware of any modern landfill in the U.S. that has leaked into the groundwater.

https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-040-03/

4th result on "landfill leak groundwater" and first solid looking, non biased answer. Yes, modern, but that's a scope on an already scoped excuse.

Second, it's not limited d to landfills. Any corporation claiming they've handled things usually means "until we can disband our Corp structure and eliminate liability". See Superfund sites for other examples, or ask why my family's creek runs orange instead of clear.

I can't find any results at all for an actual leak at a post 1991 US landfill. 0. I looked hard.

That's a pretty impressive story for modern technology.

That's what we thought in the 70ies. Now we know better.

Care to elaborate? I certainly don’t “know better”.

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