I also saw numbers saying a 50 mile by 50 mile piece of land could handle all of America's trash for 100 years if used as a landfill.

Always struck me as interesting in that you could easily section off a chunk of desert, properly sort and encapsulate the trash. At the same time fund research into ways to do recycling that is more cost efficient and more environmental friendly with regard to chemicals used, etc. Then once you have better tech for a certain class of garbage, go process it in bulk.

Of course humans being humans, we'd probably not bother to fund the research, not do upkeep on the encapsulation material and mess up the ground water, etc. Still interesting to think about just having one or two national trash dumps.