It is a bitterly cold day in July when I arrive at Cleanaway’s Lucas Heights Resource Recovery Park on Sydney’s southern edge. Standing in the car park, I stare at the huge hill that rises up behind it, its sides a scree of pale rock and dirt. Thick black pipes snake here and there across its surface, like some outsized watering system, while several hundred metres away, just over the crest of the hill, heavy vehicles are bumping back and forth, their business concealed by mounds of earth.
The hill is the Lucas Heights landfill. Locked away beneath its surface are tens of millions of tonnes of compacted garbage, a decomposing mass of rubbish 25 metres high, perhaps a kilometre long and not much less wide. From here, that seems difficult to credit. Aside from the dozens of ravens screeching overhead there is little to suggest the presence of so much waste. No smell, no tottering piles of rubbish. Instead, it looks more like a mine or a building site.
Inside the office beside the car park I am introduced to the landfill manager, L.C. Chiang. He is a slim man in his 50s with the aura of thoughtful calm I usually associate with somebody whose work involves taking time over things – an artisan or a farmer, perhaps. Chiang started his career in waste in Hong Kong, and began at Lucas Heights after moving to Australia in 2011. While I put on my hard hat and fluoro vest, he talks me through the facility’s operations. Originally set up in 1987 after the closure of the old Lucas Heights landfill, it takes garbage from councils and businesses all over southern Sydney, accepting not just the rubbish we all stick in our red bins every week, but huge volumes of construction and commercial waste. This is borne in by a steady stream of trucks – as Chiang is speaking to me, several pass through the gate outside the window – which wind their way up the hill towards the active area I glimpsed from the car park. These trucks deliver about 3000 tonnes of rubbish a day, or close to a million tonnes a year.
Handling all that waste requires a lot of engineering. Modern landfills aren’t just holes in the ground full of garbage, they’re extremely sophisticated industrial operations subject to strict environmental controls. Here at Lucas Heights, for instance, the base of the landfill is lined with a 2.5-millimetre membrane of high-density polyethylene, similar to the material used in plastic pipes and bottles, over almost a metre of clay. This liner is designed to prevent the highly toxic liquid that leaches out of the waste from contaminating groundwater or migrating into rivers and creeks. The top is also covered, first with a 300-millimetre-thick intermediate deposit of rubble and dirt, and then, once the area has settled, a final layer of 1.7 metres of soil, which will eventually be remediated into parkland or bush. Even the active part of the landfill, known as the face, is carefully managed, encircled on every side with netting to catch anything that might blow away.
Some sense of what that actually means can be gleaned from the diagram of the facility that is positioned on a stand in the office. Seen from above, the site is a bit under two kilometres from end to end, and about half that across, an irregular oval nestled in the middle of thick bushland. The active part of the facility is in the middle. At the southern end a patch of green marks out the parts of the landfill that have been permanently covered and are being rehabilitated into parkland, while near the northern perimeter a huge pit that will eventually be filled with garbage is being prepared for lining. There is something awe-inspiring about the sheer scale of it, especially when one considers that Lucas Heights isn’t the only facility like this in Sydney: Bingo’s Eastern Creek landfill is even bigger, as is Veolia’s Woodlawn Eco Precinct near Canberra, which also accepts a lot of Sydney’s waste. And they in turn are also only three of the almost 1300 landfills scattered around the country. This isn’t just garbage, this is garbage as geological force, a tide of rubbish so huge it almost defies comprehension.
Most of us don’t think about waste all that often, and when we do it is usually with discomfort and embarrassment. Waste is shunted to the margins of our consciousness, both metaphorically and in a much more literal sense, ending up being shipped away to the outskirts of our cities and towns. And that goes double for landfill. Although many people get a warm glow out of recycling and other forms of resource recovery, landfill is different. It’s where the other stuff goes, the stuff we can’t – or, more accurately, choose not to – recover. And there’s a lot of that stuff: Australia generates around 76 million tonnes of waste a year. And while a bit over 60 per cent of that is recycled or recovered in some way, close to a third, or more than 23 million tonnes – almost a tonne for every person in the country – ends up in landfill. About 30 per cent of this waste is organic material – food waste, garden waste, timber and other items – but it also incorporates large amounts of cardboard and paper, plastic, metal, building materials, glass, and soil contaminated with asbestos, chemicals or other hazardous wastes.
As we wind up around the mound in a ute, Chiang points out the Jetsons-like structure of the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor a kilometre or so to the east. The southern half of the landfill is inside the exclusion zone that surrounds the reactor, a conjunction that seems almost too neat. When I ask Chiang whether that worries him, he replies that it’s a good thing, because it means there’s no chance of the land around that part of the facility being zoned for housing. On the western slope, where the mound has been covered over and the ground drops away towards the bushland that surrounds the facility, grass grows, giving the space a bucolic feel that is only slightly diminished by the network of snaking pipes.
At the top of the mound, we stop and climb out. Birds swirl overhead: hundreds of ravens, as well as great flocks of ibis moving in formation, seagulls and dozens of pelicans, all honking and shrieking as they fight for space to land amid the trucks. In front of us, a line of orange flags and a black pipe mark the boundary of the grass; beyond them, the ground drops away into a shallow depression where huge trucks and bulldozers grind up and down through spilling piles of garbage. At one end, trucks are offloading, bags and bags of rubbish pouring out into great mounds. Once they have done that, one of several bulldozers bumps in and starts spreading it out. And finally, a massive, long-bodied vehicle with sawtooth wheels two or three metres in diameter, looking like it would be more at home in Mad Max, grinds over the top, using the points on its wheels to compact the waste.
While we stare at the trucks, I try to make notes about the profusion of stuff spread out in front of me, but there is almost too much to make sense of it. I can see tens of thousands of bags, many of them broken open, their contents spilling out, but I also spot broken furniture and bits of clothing that flap in the wind, as well as appliances and other less easily identifiable objects. There is a surprising number of splintered building pallets, and what seems to be the framework for an entire wall, as well as bundles of plastic taping unravelled from some building-site delivery. I ask Chiang what the weirdest thing he’s ever found is. He says the police often come looking for evidence of one kind or another, usually guns or clothing. “Never bodies?” I ask. He smiles. “In Hong Kong, I did help the police look for a body but we couldn’t find it.”
After a minute or two I notice the garbage seems to be moving, a curious, seething motion rippling across its surface. At first I think it must be the bags shifting as they settle; then I realise it’s the birds scrambling here and there as the rubbish is spread and compacted, gobbling anything they can see. “Do you get rats?” Chiang thinks for a moment and then shakes his head. “Not really.”
There may not be rats, but it definitely smells, although far less than I expected. To my untrained nose the odour is similar to my red bin at home, a sharp, slightly unpleasant tang. “This is a typical fresh waste smell,” Chiang says with a smile. “The older waste has a different smell.” How do they differ? He shrugs. “Older waste is less good. More sour. All waste makes different smells. When we had the garden waste here a few years ago, that also generated a different odour.”
Even well-run landfills such as Lucas Heights produce odours, meaning smell is a constant concern for landfill operators, especially as cities sprawl outwards. In 2022, Cleanaway’s Ravenhall landfill site in Melbourne’s west was fined $20,000 over smell complaints. Residents spoke of not being able to open their windows because of the stench, which one person described as “like a rotten chemical… like a rotten stink, like air freshener, but it’s not right”. Earlier this year, Bingo subsidiary Dial-a-Dump was fined $280,000 over persistent reports of offensive smells emanating from its vast Eastern Creek landfill in Sydney’s west.
Even more problematic are incidents such as the underground fire at the Barro Group’s Sunshine landfill in Melbourne’s west, which broke out in 2019, and is still burning at the time of writing. Residents, some of whose houses are only 60 metres from the site, speak of having to stay indoors and keep windows and doors closed on days the wind blows the smoke towards them.
The problem of odour and other forms of contamination is further complicated by the fact that landfills are frequently situated in areas of relatively low socioeconomic status – the area around the Sunshine landfill borders some of Melbourne’s least-advantaged suburbs. In the case of Lucas Heights, the bushland that surrounds it diminishes its impact on residents, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ever complaints. “When we get a complaint we always try to identify the source or the smell,” says Chiang. “So we ask questions about what the smell is, but sometimes they cannot really describe it, they just say ‘tip odour’.”
The smell is an indicator of something else, however – something far more significant. Not all the garbage being spread and compacted by the bulldozers is inert, inorganic matter such as concrete and metal. Instead, it contains large amounts of organic material. A lot of this is food waste, but certainly not all of it. As the building pallets being crushed by the compactor demonstrate, there is also a lot of wood, as well as cardboard, paper and other items such as nappies and adult incontinence products.
Even before it arrives here, this mess of organic material will have begun to decompose. As microbes invade it, they begin to break down the chemical bonds that hold it together, transforming organic compounds such as proteins, lipids and carbohydrates into sugars and amino acids, and releasing carbon dioxide.
But this is only the first stage in the process. As the supply of oxygen is cut off, either by the weight of the garbage above, or by the layer of earth on top of the mound, anaerobic bacteria take over. These convert the increasingly soupy mess into acids and alcohols. This process, which can continue for decades, generates heat – the interior of a landfill is typically between 60 to 90 degrees – as well as large amounts of liquid in the form of highly acidic leachate. This leachate, which must be channelled out for treatment, usually contains a smorgasbord of toxins, ranging from heavy metals to pesticides and dangerous industrial chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. Of particular concern are high concentrations of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, more commonly known as PFASs, or “forever chemicals”. Used in an astonishing variety of industrial and commercial applications – firefighting foams, non-stick surfaces on cooking products, electrical cables, paint, glue, waterproof fabrics, carpet, and even make-up and lipstick – PFASs have been linked to a long list of cancers, birth and developmental abnormalities, hormonal problems and other disorders. They are also, inconveniently for landfill operators, highly mobile, and capable of travelling long distances if they enter groundwater. In 2017, a study of 27 Australian landfills found PFASs in the leachate at all of them, and while most states now regulate the disposal of PFASs, leaks still occur, particularly as landfills age.
No less importantly, decomposing landfill produces a cocktail of gases. These include trace elements of unpleasant substances such as dimethyl and hydrogen sulphides (the compounds responsible for the unpleasant odour many of us associate with rotting garbage), ammonia and benzene, as well as considerable quantities of carbon dioxide. But most importantly, decomposing landfill releases large amounts of methane.
Methane is the main constituent in natural gas, and as such is highly flammable. More significantly, however, it is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, trapping close to 30 times as much heat across a century as carbon dioxide.
Its potency means curbing methane emissions is a crucial part of the fight against climate change. But after plateauing in the early years of the 21st century, methane emissions began rising again in 2006, and have continued to accelerate, particularly in the years since 2020. This spike in methane emissions is one of the biggest obstacles to keeping global heating under 1.5 degrees, and cutting methane emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 would avoid 0.3 degrees of heating.
About 60 per cent of methane emissions are caused by humans; three quarters of this comes from agriculture (largely what is known as enteric fermentation, or cow burps) and fossil fuel extraction, but most of the rest is produced by landfills and waste management. Indeed, while landfill gas only makes up about 20 per cent of anthropogenic methane emissions, the potency of the methane means that decomposing landfill accounts for just under 2 per cent of greenhouse emissions, about the same as aviation or global shipping. To put that in perspective, that’s almost twice Australia’s total emissions, and not a lot less than that of Japan, the seventh largest emitter in the world. Here in Australia, landfills are estimated to produce around 3 per cent of our total emissions.
Worse yet, that figure may be an underestimate. Until recently, calculations of the emissions from landfills were mostly based on modelling of data from a small number of facilities. But, over the past few years, a network of satellites and aircraft has been carrying out direct observations. It has revealed that many landfills emit far more methane than previously understood. A study published earlier this year showed landfills in the United States produce 1.4 times more methane than previously reported, while analysis of satellite data by The Guardian identified several hundred huge leaks of methane at landfills around the world in 2022. The vast bulk of these super-emitter events were centred on large, poorly managed landfills in developing countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, but they were also detected in Europe, the United States and, in one instance, Australia.
Landfill operators have traditionally dealt with this problem by either flaring the gas – essentially burning it off as it leaks out – or by extracting the gas and using it to generate energy. This converts the methane into carbon dioxide, which, while still a greenhouse gas, traps far less heat, at least in the short term. Lucas Heights, like most large landfills in Australia, takes the second approach, sinking dozens of gas wells into the mound and piping the gas to a small power plant in one corner of the site, a process that produces enough electricity to power 25,000 homes.
Cleanaway estimates its gas wells at Lucas Heights capture about 90 per cent of the methane the facility produces, but other facilities are less scrupulous. Australian government figures estimate that less than half the gas produced by landfills gets caught, and only about four-fifths of that, or a bit under 40 per cent of the total, is converted into energy. Or to put that another way, more than 60 per cent of the methane released by Australian landfills leaks away into the atmosphere.
The methane emissions produced by landfill are only one part of a far larger problem with the way Australia handles its waste. The transition to a low carbon world depends upon a move to a more sustainable – and therefore more circular – economy. Rather than bundling up our crap and tipping it into a hole, we should be reusing and recycling far more than we do at present.
Many of the technologies needed to enable this shift already exist. Cardboard, metal, plastic and many other materials can be recovered and recycled. Methane emissions from landfill could be rapidly reduced by requiring all landfill operators to install gas capture technology, or better yet, by simply banning the flow of organics to landfill altogether. Once diverted from landfill, food waste could be transformed into compost, or combined with other organic waste in anaerobic digesters. These devices, which employ the same processes of decomposition that take place in landfills under controlled conditions allow 100 per cent of the gas produced to be captured and transformed into energy, and the remaining material, known as digestate, to be used as compost. Material that is unsuitable for either composting or anaerobic digestion can be incinerated or transformed in waste-to-energy facilities.
A recognition of the importance of increasing circularity was embedded in the National Waste Policy under the Morrison government in 2019, which saw all three levels of government agree to work together to reduce waste and increase recycling. Central to the strategy was an ambitious action plan that committed to recovering or recycling 80 per cent of Australia’s waste, halving the amount of organic waste that ends up in landfill, and reducing per capita waste by 10 per cent by 2030.
Five years later, those targets look hopelessly optimistic. Not only has the overall resource recovery rate barely shifted, but both the amount of organics we send to landfill and per capita waste production have actually increased.
Mike Ritchie is the managing director of MRA Consulting Group, one of Australia’s leading environmental consultancies. A former director of Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association Australia (WMRR), he has worked for Visy, served as a sessional commissioner for the NSW Land and Environment Court and spent six years as national general manager at waste giant, Suez Australia. Ritchie says there is “little to no chance” Australia will meet the targets under existing policy settings.
“We’re currently 12 million tonnes a year behind where we need to be to meet an 80 per cent recovery rate,” Ritchie says. “By 2030, population growth and rising consumption mean that gap will be closer to 18 million tonnes. To close that gap, we’ll need to grow our recycling rate by about two to three million tonnes a year. Historically, Australia has never done anything like that – the best we’ve achieved is about a million tonnes a year. So, we need to double or triple the rate we’re growing recycling.”
Ritchie argues that the fundamental problem is a lack of accountability. “We’ve seen almost zero coordination between the states, territories and local government on how to actually achieve the targets. And there’s not a single person in Australia at a state, federal or local level whose job it is to make sure we hit them.”
Gayle Sloan is the chief executive of WMRR. When I ask her whether Australia is on track to meet the waste targets, she laughs. “We’re not even close,” Sloan says. “Our recycling rate has stagnated at 62 or 63 per cent since 2019. That means we have six years to grow it by 17 per cent. That just isn’t going to happen on our current trajectory of investment and market development.”
When asked for comment, the federal minister for the environment and water, Tanya Plibersek, emphasised the government’s investment in recycling infrastructure. “With states, territories and industry, we’re spending $1 billion on 132 projects, which will recycle an extra 1.3 million tonnes of waste, while creating over 3,000 jobs,” Plibersek said in an emailed statement. “Once this funding has been rolled out, we will almost double recycling capacity in Australia. We’ve also funded 29 projects to recycle food and organic waste, which will increase organic processing by almost one million tonnes each year.”
Sloan dismisses this claim. “The investment that the government refers to is the Recycling Modernisation Fund, commenced under the Morrison government, to address the approximately two million tonnes of predominantly plastic and paper material that were kept in Australia when their export was banned in 2019. It was never intended to address over 20 million tonnes of valuable material going to landfill every year, of which we need to divert at least another 10 million tonnes in the next six years to achieve our 2030 targets.”
Part of the problem is a lack of policies designed to divert waste, and in particular greenhouse-gas-generating organics, from landfill. In the media, recycling and diversion from landfill is often framed as a question of corporate social responsibility. But Ritchie – and indeed every person I have spoken to in the industry – argues that this is a mistake. “The industry is economically rational. They won’t drive 400 kilometres to pick up a tonne of cardboard … Nor will they drive an eight-tonne truck around the suburbs of Sydney to pick up food waste,” he says. While he allows that there are some companies committing to such practices for “brand recognition reasons”, that won’t lead most to follow suit. “The economics are dragging them the other way. In a competitive world, if I own a restaurant and it’s cheaper for me to landfill my food waste then that’s where it’s going.
“Waste is like a river. It flows downhill to the cheapest price. And in Australia, that’s almost always landfill.”
In Europe, governments have simply banned the flow of many materials to landfill altogether, resulting in rates of landfilling that are as much as 90 to 95 per cent lower than in Australia. Ritchie prefers the use of levies because they allow more flexibility, but he argues that, “Either way, governments haven’t done that work. They haven’t approached it and said, ‘Alright, we’ve made a commitment to a target of 80 per cent recycling and 50 per cent of organics, and a 10 per cent reduction in per-capita waste generation, and this is what the economic signals to achieve that need to be.’
“That’s what’s missing, that high-level plan in each state that says, ‘This is the infrastructure we need to build to achieve the levy, to achieve the targets. This is the amount of plastic recycling infrastructure we need, or concrete recycling or construction waste or commercial waste recycling that we need, to lift each of those sectors up to the 80 per cent.’”
At present, every Australian jurisdiction other than the Northern Territory imposes a landfill levy. These levies are generally higher in metropolitan areas than in regional centres, and range from just under $45 per tonne in Tasmania to $170.10 per tonne in Sydney. This price signal has already been extremely effective at lifting rates of recovery and recycling of construction waste, which have risen from around 64 per cent a decade ago to almost 80 per cent today, partly because metal and rubble and other forms of building waste are heavy, and therefore attract high levies, and partly because materials such as steel and concrete are highly recyclable.
But while recovery rates in the construction industry are rising, elsewhere they are heading south. Rates of recovery of commercial and industrial waste have fallen sharply, dropping from around 65 per cent to under 60 per cent since 2016, and after declining almost 10 per cent between 2015 and 2018, recovery of municipal waste has stagnated at under 50 per cent.
Ritchie argues that in New South Wales an annual rise of just six dollars over three years would be enough to place recovery and recycling on a trajectory that would make it possible to meet the targets, provided the revenue was invested in developing recycling infrastructure. “The problem isn’t a lack of mechanisms, it’s a lack of strategic thinking and willingness to take on the issue of waste management,” he says. “We’ve just spent six months in New South Wales with the CEO of the Environment Protection [Authority] doing almost daily press conferences about asbestos in garden mulch, and, important as that is, it’s just not as important as building a sustainable society.”
This problem is particularly stark when it comes to food waste, or what people in the waste business dub “putes” for “putrescibles”. Food waste makes up well over half the waste produced by households, and most of it ends up in landfill, where it produces methane. Because the cost of landfill remains below the point where it is more economic for councils to start separating out food waste, uptake of food organics and garden organics (FOGO) recycling has been limited, and in states where it has begun, such as Victoria and South Australia, it has been driven by mandates. In states such as New South Wales, where councils are not required to move to separate FOGO collection until 2030, less than a quarter of Sydney’s councils have set up FOGO schemes. As a result, New South Wales has not seen the development of industrial-scale composting facilities such as those that have come online in Victoria and South Australia in recent years.
But food waste is only one area where a failure to put in place the necessary market conditions is holding back investment in recycling. Although technologies exist to convert many plastics into pellets capable of being reused, Australian manufacturers are not required to use a minimum amount of recycled plastic or to use locally produced pellets, meaning that in those cases where recycled plastic is incorporated in new products it is almost always imported from China, where it can be produced more cheaply than it can here. Similarly, almost 2.5 million tonnes of timber ends up in landfill, where it emits large quantities of methane. (Much of this timber also comes from native forests, contradicting the timber industry’s claims that the carbon contained in the timber removed from forests is stored in wood products rather than ending up in the atmosphere.)
These changes need to be complemented by better regulation higher up the waste stream. Product stewardship schemes, which require manufacturers to take responsibility for the collection and disposal of the products they produce, have the potential to reduce environmental impact. This is especially true when it comes to hazardous materials, but the same principles are also applicable to many non-hazardous products. The most recent nationwide study of product stewardship schemes, published in 2023, identified 106 schemes in Australia, covering materials as various as clothing, beauty products and agricultural chemicals. In total, these schemes collected 366,000 tonnes of materials in 2022. Yet almost all of these schemes are extremely small scale, and the vast majority collect only a fraction of the products they apply to. Indeed, of the 106 schemes studied, only nine had an effectiveness of more than 50 per cent, and the remaining 97 had an average effectiveness of just 4 per cent or didn’t report at all. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the schemes that are most effective are mostly mandatory, although tyre and paint schemes, both of which are funded by industry, are extremely successful.
In some cases, the lack of effective product stewardship schemes has significant safety implications: the failure to mandate the collection of batteries is believed to be factor in the increasing number of fires at landfills and on garbage trucks; anecdotally, the problem appears to be driven by vapes, which have a habit of igniting when crushed in garbage compactors. But it also means manufacturers continue to design and produce goods that cannot be easily recycled or reused because they are not being made responsible for the cost of disposing of them.
Behind all these questions, of course, is the problem of how much waste we produce in the first place, and the consumption that drives it. Again, government has a role to play, through the establishment of right-to-repair obligations and other schemes that extend the lifetime of products, or the outlawing of single-use products and unnecessary packaging. But ultimately, cutting consumption depends upon a shift away from a culture that privileges the accumulation of private wealth to one built around principles of public good and the shared use of resources.
A move to a more circular economy would have huge benefits for Australia. In almost every instance, recycling not only avoids the need to source new raw materials, thus avoiding destructive mining and deforestation, it uses far less energy. Recycled cardboard, for instance, requires only around three quarters of the energy and a fraction of the water needed to produce cardboard from virgin pulp, while fabricating an aluminium can out of recycled metal only demands around five per cent of the energy required to produce one from scratch. Similarly recycling a tonne of glass avoids the extraction of 1.2 tonnes of raw materials, such as sand, soda ash and limestone, and reduces energy consumption by three quarters. Across the economy, these savings stack up quickly: one recent study suggests that in combination with the banning of organics from landfill and more effective capture of landfill gas and waste to energy, increased rates of recovery and recycling could cut Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by up to 10 per cent and create up to 50,000 jobs.
Why, then, aren’t governments taking more decisive action? “Governments don’t like the grind,” says Gayle Sloan. “This is long-term, systemic policy and that means making decisions and sticking to them. Instead, they want to be doing new stuff and announceables.” But she also thinks it is about a failure to understand the sector, and a tendency not to connect questions about how we handle waste with climate and economic policy. “Waste is still an end-of-pipe afterthought for government,” Sloan says. “They don’t take a material, carbon and industry approach. So, it’s a very 1980s horse-and-cart, throw-it-out-in-the-streets thing for them. They’re not thinking about the big questions. Why do we buy so much stuff? Where do we invest? How do we improve design and manufacture? None of that is where it needs to be. There’s none of that green-deal thinking.”
Mike Ritchie thinks ministers frequently lack the bandwidth to spend time on waste policy, especially when so much energy is being devoted to the energy transition. Yet he also admits to finding it baffling. “There are things you can criticise about the government’s climate policies, but one thing you can’t say is that they aren’t giving it a red-hot go,” Ritchie says. “But that’s certainly not the case with waste. When was the last time you heard somebody saying the government’s going too hard on the landfill levy, or that it shouldn’t ban organics from landfill or force big companies to recycle their food waste? It just doesn’t make sense. These are easy political wins. It’s almost risk-free politics.”
At the end of my tour of Lucas Heights, we stop at the northern end of the facility. Beside us yawns a huge pit perhaps 600 metres square and almost 50 metres deep. At the far end, a pool of leachate gleams in the winter light; at the other, several earthmovers are loading rubble and dirt into a truck ready for it to be transported to the mound behind us to be used as cover. L.C. Chiang explains that once the pit is lined they will stop adding rubbish to the top of the mound and start trucking it in here instead, and once it is full – in 2037 or so – it too will be capped, and this entire facility will cease operation.
As he speaks, I am struck again by the pride he takes in this place, its efficiency and order. But I am also reminded of the sheer volume of garbage that ends up here, and the failure of imagination and political will it embodies. Perhaps