A day in the life of a Landfill

You are a college freshman and you have just walked into one of the four major dining halls located on campus. The food choices are endless. Whether you are craving cereal, pancakes or a freshly made omelet with ham and cheese, you can take as much as want. The facility boasts that whatever you don’t want to eat, you can just put in the trash and go back up for something else. Your place your plate of half eaten food on a conveyor belt and watch it disappear forever. But, where does that food actually go after you have thrown it away? Ultimately, that food will be dumped into a trash bag and taken to a dump or landfill.

Americans generate over 250 million tons of trash per year. Although some of this garbage is recycled and reused, most of it ends up sitting in a landfill in the hopes that it will eventually biodegrade. The simple fact is that modern landfills are simply just inefficient and do not promote the actual biodegradation of mass quantities of solid waste in an environmentally responsible manner.

In order to biodegrade, large solid waste masses need oxygen and water. Current American landfills adhere to a completely different philosophy then this. Efficiency in the eyes of the landfill workers is to pack as much garbage into the tightest space possible without the infiltration of water in order to decrease smells. Waste is continually being moved and forced into smaller and smaller spaces in order to be less of a physical nuisance to humans. But, by creating an environment in which humans become less affected by the garbage they are creating themselves, they are in fact hindering the very process that they are trying to perform.

Another major hindering factor in the biodegradation process in modern landfills is the congestion created due to non-biodegradable ( usually petroleum-based products like plastics) being thrown away and mixing in with natural food wastes. Plastics, styrofoam and metals do not biodegrade and should be recycled.

Alternatives and solutions to the modern American landfill dilemma is to either build facilities that promote more environmentally sound practices of natural biodegradation and recycling programs. Changing the way the average American thinks about their personal consumption and contribution to the environment will take time but, it is doable.