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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
There was a concentrated effort to blow the problem of landfills massively, massively out of proportion in the 1980s and 1990s. I have not seen in active in a couple of decades, but the cultural detritus of the effort still floats around, and few people are terribly motivated to go correcting it since it's a dead issue.
There have been some legitimate improvements in the space since then. A disturbing amount of Grady is talking about is relatively new, not something we've been doing for a century now.
But the propaganda in the 1980s and 1990s was definitely around running out of space on Earth itself to store garbage itself because we're just generating so much. There's a picture I doubt I could dig up that has been injected into my brain of a field of garbage as seagulls fly over it and a lone backhoe in the distance tries to contend with the field of garbage. And, sure, the actual garbage dump isn't a pleasant place, though to be honest I was always sort of impressed with how little smell they tended to generate even in the 1980s. But there's a lot of unrepresentative places on Planet Earth to plop a camera. Give me a million dollars and I'll make a documentary proving Earth is uninhabited and uninhabitable. Chromecast's default photo screen saver is full of pictures of dozens of square miles of uninhabited wasteland that are very pretty colors due to the local chemical composition. But that's not a great way to understand the world in a proportional manner.
Speaking for the US at the time, in a semi-rural area, the plausibility of this was enhanced by what you would find walking through a forest. People threw a lot more stuff just straight out of their cars on the roadway, dumped cars and mattresses in state forests, all kinds of things like that. Times have changed on that front. But even then, it was really only where the people were. Most land was not full of garbage. But, pretty much by definition, the people are where the people are, so it stood out, made it a lot easier to feel like we were drowning in garbage, when all we really needed to do was take a bit better care of where we actually lived.
(This comment is about land garbage. Oceans are a completely different beast for many reasons and I'm not speaking to the issues of plastic in the ocean.)
> That is, landfills take a trivial amount of space.
Damn, I had to think about this for a second, but you are right.
How the hell did I not realize this before?
Can you please popularize this more? Maybe compress into a pithy phrase.