Did you know that the Incheon Airport in Korea is built on landfill? Yes it is. If you are local to Houston, you should know that Pearland is built right next to a huge garbage landfill! It is getting so big and bad that people are starting to complain! Why should this concern you, you ask?
We all become advocates for change because we believe in something. I am becoming more and more of recycling and natural resource advocate because I don’t want to pass down to my kids a place filled with garbage and no natural resources! Is what I’m doing enough? Doubtful. Is what I’m doing a bit too late? Probably. But I don’t want to tell my kids that I didn’t do anything.
Nor should you. Fact is that we humans consume too much. If you are gonna consume, at least be bit smarter about it. Recycle. At Ellington Airfield, Clear Lake area people have a place to drop off all kinds of stuff to recycle. I sure hope to give it all I’ve got to help my kids’ place better…
Recycling, much like the organic/local/seasonal/fresh food craze is something that people hear and immediately their brains go into this dualistic mode of good and bad. As in: recycling is good and not recycling is bad. I am a little more agnostic about it. Certain things make sense to recycle such as aluminum since it probably takes more energy to produce it from mining and processing bauxite than from recycling your coke cans. Other things, it probably does not matter that much, and still in other things recycling is wasteful and inefficient. A broad rule of thumb: if someone pays you for it then it probably is efficient, if you have to pay someone (either directly or through your taxes via government subsidies) or if there is a law about it, then it probably is not efficient.
Anyway, if you are concerned about scarce resources and land usage for your children, you probably should be more concerned about solar panels or windmills or even electric cars than about landfills. As you stated, landfills at least can be ‘recycled’ into such things as airports or parks or something else later on.
Oh, btw, I would not be surprised if most lanfill processing centers in the US have places where they take out some recyclable materials.