Landfill is other people’s backyard
In my last article I asked a question: do you know where your trash goes once you throw it?
It’s just trash, oh my god. Nobody cares what happens to it, I just want all the contents of my bin out of my sight.
If this statement reflects your thoughts, you may have potential as a waste management local department chief, because that is exactly what they did. You have justification, as garbage bags are none of your concern, but they do are the mayor’s responsibility, at least. But mayors all across the world agree with you. Out of sight, out of mind, out of my list of problems. Right?
Right?
Let us talk now about landfill.
Landfill consists of the disposal of material by burying it. Find (or make) a hole in the ground, dump any kind of waste material in, cover everything with loose dirt and compact until none of it is visible. It is just a modern, fancier version of the classical dump, which has been in use for as long as we can see in human history. Waste dumps from ancient cities have become a true goldmine for archeologists, as they contain precious details of the day to day lives of previous civilizations, but for less curious individuals landfills have just one single use: to get rid of waste that we do not know how to process or reuse, no matter its provenance or composition.
Modern landfills are more complex than that, including an impermeable lining below that prevents groundwater pollution, and a leachate (liquid runoff that leaks from the material) treatment plant. They also feature a system of pipes and pumps to capture the gasses generated by the mixed refuse, containing methane or hydrogen sulfide. These gases can be flared, burned into less harmful products, or they can even be used in waste-to-energy applications such as generating heat and electricity for decades after the landfill has been filled. Moreover, once a landfill is considered full, it can be covered with a thick layer of dirt and converted into a small forested hill, none the wiser of what can be found just a few meters below the ground. They can be converted into nice views, or even parks to take your kids for a picnic. In principle, these high-tech dumps have virtually no environmental or health consequences in their immediate environment. They take decades to fill, all of their problematic secondary products are processed into clean water and clean energy, and the end result is virtually unnoticeable. Throw, cover with dirt, cover with trees and forget. It seems simple, straightforward enough that there is no way I can find any gripes with this method. It is flawless, period.
Vistas from Puente Hills Landfill Park, California.
I would like to ask you a few more questions first, and you can try to answer them in your head according to your best knowledge.
Where is the landfill your trash goes to, exactly?
Which neighbourhood, which city, which country?
Is it built according to the high standards described above?
Landfills are always built on solid, impermeable flat ground, preventing avalanches of trash and not causing any groundwater pollution?
The responsible individuals always dig a properly bottom lined hole, properly covered and sanitized so that the methane will be collected and used, and not just released to the atmosphere?
They will at least make a hole, right? Not just an uncovered pile of trash?
Did the people living next to a waste dump get a choice about its construction? Are they benefiting from it in any form of economic or social way, beyond the owners of the dump?
What do we do when the hole is full? Just dig another hole somewhere else? Is there an infinite number of holes for us to use?
Is the plan to just leave the trash in the hole forever? Act like it does not exist anymore? Is that truly “managing” waste, or just kicking the can down the road?
I think these questions are not subtle. The point cannot be easily missed. Theoretically, waste dumps may be a great solution, but the reality of them is not nearly as good as the blueprint. Landfills are just a mental shrug when dealing with garbage. It is a half-assed planning effort because it is not a solution after all, just a stable method of waste storage until a processing method can be found.
According to the World Bank, one third of the total world solid waste is “disposed of” in open dumps, just thrown wherever they may fall in a designated area and accumulating on uncontrolled piles of refuse. If you add all the landfills of unspecified quality (that we can safely assume to be mostly of poor quality, why would you not mention your quality and standards in your information if they are indeed good), the number goes up to 58.2% of all solid waste. More than half of the trash worldwide ends up on literal piles of trash, open to the air and barely separated from groundwater. Another 11.4% is put in properly set landfills, and all other methods deal with 30.1%. A sad conclusion can be easily gleaned from the data. Unregulated dumps are the default solution to waste management.
Why does this happen?
There is a combination of factors at play here. Practically, a well-designed landfill is costly to build, costlier to operate and even more problematic to maintain post-filling. Complex regulations have to be followed to the letter. This requires large amounts of investment, workers are highly qualified professionals, smell mitigation techniques like covering the last layer overnight increase operation costs, remediation of gasses and leachate are even more expensive than any other part… Everything drives up costs, and the only income for landfills comes from storage fees per kilogram. The final cost of regenerating the area once the hole is full is also legally demanded from operators, ensuring maintenance for up to 30 years after the landfill is officially closed. Every single step is added to the price, and city halls need to do the math when shopping for options for their needs. Some of the most successful stories like the Puentes Hill Landfill worked because there was a nearby urban center with massive demand and strong environmental protections in the state, justifying the necessary investment.
Most cities cannot do the same. They will publish a tender for the waste disposal service, and choose the cheapest option, regardless of quality. Waste management is not a prestigious occupation, and the only problem for city officials is to remove the trash from the city, not anything that happens after. This tension between city needs, legal requirements, public money and a problem nobody wants to deal with is the source of the illegal waste dumping market. And the market is booming.
Waste mafia, ecomafia, illegal trash, trash trading. These are the names used to talk about one of the largest illegal businesses in operation nowadays, but for Naples this is an old scourge. Organized crime groups operating in South Italy like the Camorra have earned significant income from illegal dumping. It is their bread and butter, as it is a low-risk high-pay job that can be gained by corrupting local officials, or most of the time without even using any intimidation or manipulation but just by offering cheap prices for waste management that never actually happens. It is the easiest job in the book, and highly profitable too. The proceeds from these seemingly innocuous crimes pay for the other, more violent activities of these groups, as many citizens in Italy that have to suffer them every year already know.
Illegal dumping moves at least $12B per year worldwide, on par with serious crimes such as human trafficking, but it barely carries any risk or punishment for the criminal. Most of the crimes can be described as white collar, like writing fake reports or miss-classifying waste. You only need one dump site in a location with lax law enforcement or with no supervision, a manufactured paper trail and very few scruples. This is how the so-called “land of fires” came to exist in Naples.
A photo taken near Naples, in 2019.
The Campania region in Italy has struggled with environmental contamination since the 1980s. The Camorra has used the fields nearby as an illegal dump in one of their most profitable rackets, taking all kinds of toxic and non-toxic refuse to “manage” to just leave it in abandoned quarries, on the curbs of seldom-visited roads or just burning them in a field, giving the unfortunate nickname to this region. They did not need to bribe their way to this business, their growth through Italy was natural considering they offered the same service as other environmental companies at a fraction of the cost. All of the trash of the nation found its way to Campania, which today hosts more than 5000 identified dump sites. This is not a historical problem. The Camorra is still flooding this region with truckloads of waste, and it is still one of their main breadwinning operations.
At some point, doctors started to notice a baffling fact: cancer rates soared dramatically in the region. Some communities saw an increase of between 30% to 47% increase in cancer rates, especially around an area called the “triangle of death” that suffered an extraordinary number of trash fires. Moreover, the criminal group has used the Mediterranean Sea to throw some of the most polluting chemicals they had to deal with, extending the contamination beyond this area in particular.
Of course, this is not a problem restricted to Italy but it is without a doubt the paradigmatic example of how landfills are implemented in action. And we can see even worse examples when we start looking at one of the most shameful practices of the modern world: waste trading.
In theory, a city hall hires a waste management company to landfill a certain amount of mass per year, and pay a fee. But in practicality, they just hire it to drive it out of the city. The company may not be able to manage all of the different types of waste accordingly. In fact, it may not be able to handle any waste at all. They take the trash to a temporary storage, and sub-contract a group of other companies for a lower price to take care of the problem, and pocket the difference without having to do too much work. They may classify, separate, store and move the waste between different facilities, or the sub-contracted companies do their own share of sub-contracting, on and on until the material ends up on the lowest bidder on the market. The shell game of material makes the entire sector opaque, as it cannot be streamlined or followed easily, moreover if they move the material between countries. This is how we end up with blights such as the international waste trade.
The process is simple. Load the trash in a container, book the transport to a port on the other side of the world, and pay a small fee to an unregulated open dump in India, China, Ghana or Turkey, or wherever a cheaper price can be offered. And pocket the difference, of course. As waste is normally regulated by regional or national laws, no rule was being broken during this process. And for the longest time this was tolerated by normally eco-conscious countries, until very recently. Effectively some countries paid other countries for the service of making the trash bags disappear. Where they go later is irrelevant, the point is just not to see them anymore. The most famous examples are the e-waste dumps in Agbogbloshie and Guiyu, but they are not the only ones.
There is something perverse about trading a commodity not by how much does the importer want them, but rather by how much the exporter wants to get rid of it. Even worse, it was widely used by eco-conscious countries as they tried to reduce the waste numbers at home, like Japan or Germany. Their numbers looked better, sure, but there was no real improvement, just displacement. Some of the waste trading is done to send plastics, glass and other materials to specialised processing facilities for recycling and reuse, but the vast majority of tonnage was nefarious in intent. Thankfully, this practice has been curtailed recently, more due to the recipient countries making the activity illegal than by any conscious effort by the source of the problem. However, even within countries, there are imbalances in who deals with the trash.
Roma and traveller communities are by far the most exposed to this form of environmental discrimination all across Europe, as they always seem to end up forcefully relocated to quite literal piles of trash. There are too many cases of this racist discrimination to discuss in this article, with relevant evidence of blatant discrimination. There are dozens of similar cases happening right now to working migrant communities in Spain, Italy and other areas of South Europe. And you do not need me to tell you where the trash piles tend to be located in the USA. It is marginalised, poor and rural communities, of course. In Egypt, the zabbaleen have collected and recycled the waste of Cairo for more than 50 years. They were born from subsistence farmers that lost their income and found a way to survive as informal garbage collectors. They were evicted from their homes in the 1970s and built a separate shanty town called Garbage City. Informal garbage pickers in India suffer similar treatment. This is not a blame game of specific individuals or nations, it is a systemic issue born from misguided incentives on the use of landfills for waste collection.
Moqattam district, Cairo. Home of the zabbaleen. Picture by Peter Dench.
When you pay attention to the official data on waste management published by governments and organisations, it is very easy to come to one conclusion: landfill consists of dumping the trash next to the poorest, most disadvantaged or most discriminated people available to you, and paying them a pittance for the trouble. Most “landfills” never become what they are called and just turn into massive piles of refuse in open dumps. Smelly, unsanitary and plain dangerous, thrown next to the people least likely to complain. They are so badly implemented that their methane emissions contribute significantly to climate change.
One of the most galling things of this affair is that even when they are properly designed and managed to minimise damage, they solve nothing for the long term. Landfills are not a waste processing step like advertised: they are supposed to be a waste storage step, a temporary home to materials until we can find a use for them. There is no clear path or effort to eventually do that. The areas fit for their construction are limited, and the rate of deployment of new landfill areas sometimes lags behind the rate of production of trash. This solution is not scalable or sustainable in the medium to long term, and it is very clearly failing today. We are making permanent sacrifice areas covered in pestilence, and the plan is for the trash to be set in new holes in the future. Hopefully, in other people’s backyard.
A better solution is needed. We need to make the trash disappear, permanently and efficiently. A solution that can be implemented in every city and region to take care of their own garbage without exporting the problem to other communities, without polluting land and river, and hopefully generating a profit in the process. Disperse, like a cloud of smoke.
We need to burn the trash.