ined. Many are located in close proximity to aquifers orother groundwater features, or near geologically unstable sites. Many olderlandfills are leaching toxins into our water supply at this very moment,with no way to stop them. For example, the Fresh Kills landfill leaks anestimated one million gallons of toxic ooze into the surrounding water tableevery day [Miller 527]. Sanitary landfills do offer certain advantages.Offensive odors, the mainstay of the old city dump, are dramatically reducedby the daily cover of clay or other material. Vermin and insects, both ofthe terrestrial and airborne varieties, are denied a free meal and theopportunity to spread disease, by the daily clay layer. Furthermore, modernlandfills are less of an eyesore than their counterparts of yore. However,the causality of these positive affects are the very reasons for some of thesignificant drawbacks to landfills [Turk and Turk 486]. The daily compactingand covering of the garbage deposits effectively squeezes the availableoxygen out of the material. Whatever aerobic bacteria are present in thegarbage are soon suffocated and decomposition stops. Anaerobic bacteria, bytheir very nature, are not present in appreciable numbers in our biosphere.What few manage to enter and survive in the garbage deposits are slow-actingand perform little in the way of breaking down the materials. In otherwords, rather than the giant compost heap most people imagine, a landfill isactually a huge mummification center. Hot dogs and bananas, decades old,have been recovered from landfills, still recognizable in their mummifiedsplendor [Rathje 111-12]. What little decomposition does occur in landfillsgenerates vast amounts of methane gas, one of the significant greenhouseeffect gasses. Some landfills have built-in processes to reclaim themethane. The Fresh Kills landfill pipes methane gas directly into thousandsof homes, but in most instances, the gas is either burned off or leakeddirectl...
