A Prediction

• The time will come when capped off landfills will be extensively mined for the buried resources.




• Yes, I know that methane gas is already commonly extracted, it's one of the uses that causes me to make the above claim. What I mean is we'll see full scale efforts to take metals (for one) of course when standard extraction of raw materials becomes too expensive but, they'll be taking gasses and other components we may not even be familiar with for purposes we could only guess at now. There is a tremendous amount of energy potential in the giant landfills across the US.




• It will be more common as robotic technology becomes more sophisticated (especially sniffer tech.) and cheaper.




• The National Elephant Center is on a landfill site owned by Waste Management http://www.thenationalelephantcenter.org/ with elephants arriving late 2009.

• Already parks, housing developments, industrial parks are planned in other areas over closed landfills.

• When the public learns extractors are wanting to come in and exploit some of these sites communities will protest- so in essence instead of saying "Not in my backyard" to a dump as we've often heard in the past, they'll be saying, "Save Our Dump!"

The above picture is a landfill that's been converted to a wildlife preserve. Look here http://www.town.cedarburg.wi.us/cm/pdfs/Former%20Landfill%20to%20Park%20Examples.pdf for other examples.