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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>you don't have literal square miles of landfills that occupy land

Land area is a non-issue. Google says Switzerland produces "80 to 90 million tonnes" of garbage per year. Assuming that garbage has the same density of water, and a landfill is 10 meters deep, a 1 sq mi landfill will last 287 years. Moreover, Wikipedia says Switzerland has 15,940 square miles of land, so that will only take up 0.006% of the country's land area.

>eventually will leak lovely chemicals into groundwater

this is a non-issue in modern landfills because they're designed with various mechanisms to prevent that from happening (eg. lining).

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Is your math right? 90 million tons of water/10 m gets me 1.7 km2, so a 1 sq mi landfill would last around ... 1 year, not 287.

That said, of the 90 million of waste, 60-70 million is construction waste, and just 6 million tons is municipal waste. On the other hand, I'm not sure you can just assume that waste has the same density as water; from a cursory glance it seems to about 1/3.

https://www.bafu.admin.ch/bafu/en/home/topics/waste/in-brief...

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28volume+of+90+million... (sorry I was all out of napkins)

Don’t think it’s even a year… should be 8-9e6 m^2 per year, or 3-3.5 mi^2 per year.

I think you're right. Here's my math:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%281+square+mile+*+1...

A mile is 1609m

A sq mile is 1609x1609 = 2,588,881 square meters

Times 10m, 25,888,810 cubic meters

A cubic meter of water weighs 1000 Kg

> Is your math right? 90 million tons of water/10 m gets me 1.7 km2, so a 1 sq mi landfill would last around ... 1 year, not 287.

You're right, looks like I forgot to convert liters to tons.

>On the other hand, I'm not sure you can just assume that waste has the same density as water; from a cursory glance it seems to about 1/3.

is this before or after compaction? Intuitively speaking, most things I throw out would sink in water. A garbage bin/trash bag might float because it has a bunch of air, but presumably that will all get pushed out when buried 10 meters deep.

Well you clearly don't have great intuition

Why is that, could you elabotate?

There is no evidence that those mechanisms will last longer than the pollution from the landfill. Nor should we base plans on "nothing bad will definitely happen"

this non-issue happened in a modern landfill near my hometown.

They just used a different grade of material and pocketed the difference.

The chemicals area leaching now into the groundwater. Any researchers reporting on that are sued. Even police is used for intimidation.

Country is Germany.

I think many of us get so used to modeling problems in closed systems that we have a blind spot about human behavior irl.

I'm continually surprised by blatant corruption in first world countries. It's like I expect privilege to translate into integrity.

Can you elaborate which town and landfill?

>Assuming that garbage has the same density of water

It is probably much less dense.

>Moreover, Wikipedia says Switzerland has 15,940 square miles of land, so that will only take up 0.006% of the country's land area.

I do not think many landfills are located in mountains and Switzerland is fairly mountainous. The available livable and arable land is a fraction of its total land area.

Just because something is designed to do something doesn't mean that it will.

Especially on long time scales.

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