I find landfill chemistry weirdly fascinating, particularly the idea that untold millions of tons of garbage being stored in giant, artificial landforms—or simply buried underground like false geological deposits—might be inadvertently catalyzing chemical processes we neither understand nor know how to stop. I was thus excited to see a long investigation of this topic in Bloomberg last week, led by journalists Laura Bliss and Rachael Dottle.
At the Chiquita Canyon Landfill here in greater Los Angeles, a disquieting smell—not to mention strange medical issues—has been tormenting local neighbors for years. But there is “no simple solution,” we read, “because what’s driving it is something buried beneath the waste: a complex and dangerous chemical reaction whose very nature is in dispute.”
The side-effects of that complex chemical reaction include elevated, sometimes “scorching,” underground temperatures and the production of Dantean landscape scenes above: “In early 2022 a closed section in the landfill’s northwest corner began overheating, eventually reaching temperatures above 200F (93C). That’s nearly 40% hotter than the federal EPA’s standard for landfill operations. As the waste slowly cooked, it belched out toxic gases, elevating nearby levels of hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide and benzene, which can damage DNA and cause leukemia after enough exposure. Large amounts of leachate (basically, trash juice) built up and bubbled, boiled and even shot into the air like geysers.” The belch as landscape phenomenon.
The article is worth reading in full, and goes into much further depth about all of this. One important point is the potential role played by new types of material waste, including lithium-ion batteries, vape pens, electric toothbrushes, and other electronic goods whose presence might be at least partially to blame for rising subterranean temperatures in landfills across the United States.
But what continues to interest me about this overall problem, and why I’m posting about landfills again, is something more abstract than just waste-management practices or oxygen-content regulations in the disposal industry: we continue to create things we don’t know how to get rid of, objects whose attempted destruction only empowers them and materials whose burial makes them harder to control.