Withal, I always wondered how the alternative disposal methods (composting, the City Dump, "recycling" ?) affected the atmosphere overall as compared to simply burning trash. Let alone pot.
I currently live in the town where I grew up. We can pretty much tell how long someone has been in town by how they refer to the trash facility. In the "good old days," it was an open dump behind the town hall. My cousin and I frequently made stops there on the way home on days when we rode our bicycles to school to see what goodies we could unearth.
Then the town moved the open dump to a tract of vacant land they bought on the western edge of town. When the state clamped down on open dumps, the open dump became a "sanitary landfill." That just meant that every day or so, after people had dumped all their trash, the landfill operators (recycled public works truck drivers) dropped some dirt on top of the trash and scraped it around a bit.
And then that operation reached what the state, in its infinite wisdom, had decreed was the capacity limit for "sanitary landfill" operations, so adjacent to that the town constructed a transfer station. Now all our trash goes into dumpsters and is then hauled off by various companies to various places, depending on the nature of the trash. There's a dumpster for construction debris, a dumpster for metal (large stuff, like bicycles, lawn mowers, etc.), a dumpster for recyclables, and a pair of compactor dumpsters for ordinary household waste.
The former "sanitary landfill" is quite a mount, and we tend to call it Mount Trashmore. Interestingly, there are a number of white tubes sticking up out of the ground around Mount Trashmore. Those are monitoring wellpoints. It seems all that trash under the many layers of fill is decomposing and emitting methane gas, and the state periodically checks the wellpoints to see how much methane is being released into the atmosphere. This has been going on for about thirty years, and as far as I know Mount Trashmore is still outgassing.
