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The Engineering of Landfills
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] This is the Puente Hills Landfill outside of Los Angeles, California. The first truckload of trash was dumped here in 1957, and the trucks just kept coming. For more than five decades, if you threw something away in LA County, t
The main goal of a landfill is to maximize the volume of waste that can be stored there while minimizing the cost and the environmental impacts too, which turns choosing a suitable site into a giant geometry problem. Pretty much, if you can get a college degree in it, it’s going to come into play when siting a landfill: geology, geography, politics, archaeology, public relations, biology, every kind of engineering, and lot more. I hope the future is a utopia where all the stuff we make maintains its beneficial value forever, but for now, I am thankful for the sanitary engineers and the other professions involved in safely and economically dealing with our trash so we don’t have to.
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