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Comment by jrmg | Hacker News Reader

The supposed triviality of this size is not sitting well with me.

What’s described is a 100 yard deep hole. So about 27 stories. It’s 35 miles per side, so 35 x 35 = 1225 square miles in area. That’s bigger than any city in the mainland US[1].

It’s a 27 story deep hole that’s twice as big as Houston. Three times as big as the city of LA, and over half the size of the urban metropolitan LA area[2]. Four times the size of New York (or three times, if you include the water as well as the land).

This is not a trivial amount of land - and it gets worse if you were not to have it be (ridiculously!) one hundred yards deep.

I’m not arguing we’re about to run out of landfill space imminently, but calling this ‘trivial’ is not what I’d call it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles

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That's also just the volume of trash. It doesn't include all the support infrastructure present at each landfill or the buffer real estate so that it is not adjacent to any desirable real estate. It's not practical to have a single huge landfill serving the country, so these other factors get multiplied by every actual landfill site we build. Still there are scant few, if any, counties in the U.S. that are so strained on real estate they can't bury their garbage.

It's trivial compared to the amount of space in the US and the timelines we're talking about.

Realistically no one is going to build this super hole, it will be 1,000 smaller landfills built over 1,000 years.

Why would you compare it to the size of a single city? Everyone doesn’t live in a single city and we’re talking about a landfill to take trash for 1000 years.

Fair enough. Here it is visualized using Google Earth:

https://x.com/breckyunits/status/1831080588406849585

The largest open cut mine in the world, Bingham Canyon, is more than ten times as deep.

While it's not a good idea to just chuck stuff into an abandoned mine, the effort to excavate a hole that size is doable for a single site operated by a single company employing 2000 workers over a century. It's pretty trivial in comparison to any other environmental problem.

> hole that size

Bingham Canyon is roughly cone shaped, not comparable to the rectangular prism described above.

To achieve comparable volume of the rectangular prism, you will need to dig a much deeper cone.

https://www.mining-technology.com/features/feature-top-ten-d...

Quick calc: An 1000 yard deep cone with 35 mile diameter has 3x as much volume as a rectangle shaped hole 100 yards deep with 35 miles on each side.

> To achieve comparable volume of the rectangular prism, you will need to dig a much deeper cone.

Yeah, holes with sloped sides are easier to dig than vertical-walled ones. But you don't need to have them sloping all the way down to a deep point in the middle; for a shallow (comparatively, like this) hole you can just slope the walls down to the same flat bottom.

At a 45-degree angle, you could have the bottom of your 100-yard-deep pit be 35 miles - 100 yards across, and the opening 35 miles + 100 yards. Which would be a pretty negligible difference on the surface -- and, I think, make the volume a tiny bit bigger.

There's a quarry in the Chicago area, quite close to the city and visible from the interstate, that's over 100 yards deep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornton_Quarry#/media/File:Th.... Digging such a deep hole isn't ridiculous at all. Also, as the video shows, landfills usually rise a significant height above the surrounding land (and are converted into a hilly park when finished).

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