I wonder if in 100-500 years they will mine landfills for materials or elements that have become scarce. Or maybe they will just keep them as natural gas reactors.
Once oil gets too expensive to pull out the the ground, mining plastic from landfills and decomposing it back to the hydrocarbons might end up big business.
The natural gas/ ch4 production follows a pretty well known curve, at about 40-50 years it's nowhere near as potent. And with the push to keep organics out of the modern landfills that might get even worse.
On basic principles, it sounds a whole lot easier than mining landfills? But that's assuming the capital costs can be lowered enough. (Solar costs keeps dropping, they figure out the other costs.)
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/01/terraform-industries-conve...
that's one of the reasons I keep my trash in neat layers ordered chronologically