Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

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> If humans are to stay on this planet, in the long term we cannot just keep piling up garbage in landfills and building on top of it. Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land. Its going to be a lot better if we just make our waste as recyclable as possible in the first place.

Landfill space is not the issue at all. Landfills do not take up that much physical space, and we have plenty of empty space to use.

The issue is around the greenhouse gases released creating all of those disposable products and the resources going into their production.

If it was just landfill space, we would be totally fine.

Also...

> Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land.

Over that time scale the land automatically remediates itself. There's a hill in Rome made of a big pile of Roman garbage. The hill is more useful than the pots were.

In the 60s there was a junk yard that some developer put a bunch of houses on top of near my house. Decades later nearly everyone that lived there developed cancer.

On that time scale, we can just build elsewhere instead. It's a complete non-issue once we know about the risks.

Boston as well, iirc. And parts of Chicago (a city that was built ontop of an actual swamp)

Related; In mid 19th century, Entire neighborhoods of Chicago were lifted up on jackscrews to raise the street above the swamp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

We were able to lift entire neighbourhoods in the 19th century but now we can't even build houses...

Coastal commission's head would explode if we tried to lift a neighborhood.

We can still build them now. It's a question of whether we're allowed.

I think that’s exactly what OP meant

Yep! I love my city for a lot of reasons but stuff like this are some of my favorite bits of Chicagoland trivia.

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