There is no such place as “away” when it comes to throwing things away, which means there’s a good chance that when you throw something “away” in New York City or Ontario Canada or anywhere around New York State, for that matter, it will likely end up at Seneca Meadows landfill—i.e., other people’s backyards.
Plastic and metal don’t dissappear when thrown away because they take a very long time to decompose, meaning they remain in the environment for hundreds of years, breaking down only into smaller pieces instead of fully disappearing.
Plastic is especially problemmatic because, when it fragments into tiny microplastics it can enter the food chain. In this way, plastic contributes not just to pollution in landfills, but to waterways, and oceans, harming wildlife and human ecosystems a like.
To be specific, a plastic bottle made from PET takes around 450 years to decompose and, in so doing, breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, sometimes almost undetectable, but still able to be found in areas as remote as the Arctic Ocean and even within the placentas of unborn babies.
The point to be underscrored here is that, once something is created, it can never be fully destroyed; only shape shifted, so to speak, like the change that occurs in a horror movie when a normal person changes to a werewolf or a vampire.
This statement is supported by the “Law of Conservation of Mass," which states that matter cannot be created or destroyed, only changed from one form to another; meaning the total amount of matter in a closed system remains constant during any physical or chemical change.
And so when it comes to landfills, the trash buried there will assume other forms such as toxic leachate or toxic gases. And since matter cannot be created or destroyed, even burning gas in combustion engines to create so-called “energy” doesn’t “destroy” the gas, but just changes it into a different set of pollutants.
And so, for every 100 tons of trash burned by an incinerator, 30 tons become toxic ash that goes to landfills. The other 70 tons don’t turn into energy, but become air pollution.
(Note: Incinerator ash is toxic, but the U.S. EPA allows a special test that enables it to test as nonhazardous, saving the industry a lot of money.)
Likewise, the dumps of the Roman Empire, more than 2,000 years old, are still leaching today.
A landfill is a threat, effectively, forever.