Landfilling represents a failure to properly manage valuable resources, and waste itself (specifically, municipal solid waste) should therefore be viewed as a materials management issue (crime) because it’s predominantly composed of materials that can provide resources, revenue and jobs required to support this (and every) region’s sustainability which, if acted upon in this way, would also remove the toxic threat that land-filling currently creates.
(The true crime, statistically speaking, is that approximately 8 millions tons of glass, 27 million tons of plastic, 18 million tons of paper, and 15 million tons of metal are rendered forever useless by being buried in landfills thoughout the U.S every year, according to the EPA.)
In fact, scores of other communities across the U.S. are no longer permitting these materials to be disposed of in a landfill but are, instead, separating them for processing and returning them to the economic mainstream for industrial and agricultural uses, thus contributing to local revenue, business expansion, and their economic base—i.e., acknowledging that recycling a ton of waste has twice the economic impact of burying it in the ground.
The goal should therefore be to transform the existing philosophy of “managing solid waste” (i.e., land-filling) into a “resource management” or “materials management” paradigm.
Burying recyclables not only destroys the materials themselves, but the embodied energy in those materials, forcing us to pay all over again the upstream cost to remanufacture them, which amounts to producing, on average, another 71 tons of waste during the drilling, logging, mining, transporting, and manufacturing needed to re-make 1 ton of these products.
In addition, a typical recycling-sorting facility in the U.S. has been proven to sustain approximately 10 times more jobs than it currently takes to bury the same material (composting jobs are 4:1). [Source: Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Washington, D.C., 1997, and Tellus Institute, “More Jobs, Less Pollution Report,” November 2011, page 34.]
But since corporations that own landfills make their money on a per pound basis from burying waste materials in the ground, and have paid lobbyists in Washington, DC, paid lobbyists in Albany, and paid townships such as Waterloo and Seneca Falls (through so-called host community fees), you are not likely to see any major changes in how waste is dealt with any time soon.
Landfills are, effectively, a dead-end for waste, preventing the creation of a circular economy in which materials are constantly reused and waste is minimized.
As a representative from the investment industry said: “recycling has long been the enemy of the solid waste industry, stealing volumes otherwise headed for landfills … their most promising assets."