Sometimes being wasteful just feels sooo good … doesn’t it? Crushing a measly plastic water bottle in your hand. Slamming that gum wrapper on the asphalt. Drinking from Styrofoam cups. It’s just so … dangerous. Living life on the wild side sure has its draws. Until you see your very first landfill or take your first swim in the Pacific with someone else’s old Doritos bag. I saw a landfill with my own eyes for the first time when I was in Israel. There, the state digs these massive craters in the sand, then covers the piles of garbage in more dirt so that when you look out from the highway you see what look like brown Leggos bigger than US air force base hangars.
An old landfill near Tel Aviv, commonly called "Shit Mountain"
As you learn what exactly it is that you are looking at, you start to picture this reality:
Common landfill image, though this one happens to be from the UK
In researching these lovely photos, I came across some info on what exactly is to become of that Tel Aviv landfill, formerly called Hiriya. Apparently, this guy Eli Cohen uses biological organisms to digest trash and turn it into other useful things and guess what … it works. One blog says he has a ton of environmentally friendly sanitation sites in Israel, one being Hiriya. MSNBC, meanwhile, ran a story on Hiriya and a video that features some guy talking about all the changes.
In the next decade or two, that massive Leggo of trash (I promise, from the road it really resembles a big Leggo) will in fact be a national park! Now maybe I don’t want to go rolling around in trash pretending its a park, but I would sure rather look at something that appears to be a park than stare at Shit Mountain. So riddle me this: why is it so hard for other businesses or governments to adopt similar methods for more efficiently getting rid of human waste?
PandemicGreen 
I love that picture of shit mountain. Beautiful in its own way, no?
Here’s what I know about efforts to be a little more creative about garbage than just piling it into gigantic mountains. A company in Florida is building a plasma-arc incinerator next to one of the largest landfills in the state, which is meant to burn all the old garbage in the dump and convert it into energy. Toxic substances are supposed to be trapped in an inert, glass-like clinker that is the byproduct of the superhot incineration process. If it works, we’re pretty sure to see many more of these. And in the meantime, now that the price of oil is up, many of the larger landfills are capturing methane for conversion to usable fuel rather than flaring it off.
Things are looking up, a little bit, perhaps?
Also you might find my blog of some interest in relation to landfill: http://landfill.wordpress.com.
Happy blogging and keep up the good work!
Marijke