America is facing a crisis regarding sanitary landfills. The crisis has come about because of American attitudes. America is involved with a love affair with disposables: from disposable diapers to excess packaging of goods. For decades, Americans have disposed of their garbage in landfills. Despite efforts at recycling and generating less waste, the prevailing attitude is that there will always be a landfill available, so why bother with conservation? An initial approach to the topic of landfills then is to determine how much landfill capacity actually exists in America and whether or not that capacity is expected to be exceeded in the near future.
I chose the subject of landfills after reading the incredible story of the garbage barge Mobro 4000. In 1987, this barge became an international joke when it was forced to float up and down the Atlantic Ocean for about six months in search of some place to unload its cargo: several thousand tons of garbage. The cargo of the Mobro 4000 was first rejected by New York, then all the states south of New York on the eastern seaboard, and eventually Mexico, the Bahamas, and Belize. The cargo was eventually reduced to several hundred tons of ash and dumped in New York. This bizarre tale is evidence that America is running out of sanitary landfill sites.
Like most issues, the landfill crisis probably has two different opposing viewpoints. Environmental experts are likely to contend that America's cavalier attitude toward conservation has gotten the country's landfills into big trouble. As a result, the nation's landfills are overflowing. In contrast would be the big businesses who manufacture disposable consumer goods. These companies would, of course, deny the existence of a sanitary landfill problem.
Since I tend to side with the environmentalists on the issue of the sanitary landfill crisis, the next question is, where can new landfills be built? Granted, the need for...