Ever wonder what’s in a landfill? Ever been asked that before? This morning, I stumbled across an interesting article entitled "Looking into Landfills". In 1987, after learning that no one had ever actually dug into a landfill to determine the contents, Dr. Rathje, an archeologist from Arizona, and his colleagues began the process of excavating 4 landfills. With a truck-mounted bucket auger, they dug approximately 90 feet into each landfill, taking samples of the garbage at 10-foot depths. After analyzing the garbage, they discovered that what we think is in landfills and what happens to it over time, may be based more on myths than on facts.

Dr. Rathje concluded that the space taken up by items like fast-food packaging (.25%) and disposable diapers (1%) were far less than originally thought. But, keep in mind, these statistics could be old. After doing some quick research, I found an article at Restaurant USA Online (now defunct) that compared the year 2000 to 1981.

Average annual consumption of commercially prepared meals has increased by roughly 15 billion meals since 1981, when an average of 3.7 meals per person, per week were consumed — an annual total of 38.4 billion meals. That number is now 4.2 meals per week for the typical American age 8 and older.

According to the Garbage Project team, newspapers averaged about 14% of the landfill volume. That doesn't surprise me considering it takes 75,000 trees to print the Sunday Edition of the New York Times. (See article.) I'm optimistic that that number will decrease significantly as more people start reading newspapers online.

Dr. Rathje also proved that biodegradable is a joke. (He didn't actually use the word joke, but I do.) "Biodegradable” refuse breaks down extremely slowly in the anaerobic (oxygen-free) conditions of a landfill. Foods such as hotdogs and pastries that were buried for as many as fifteen years, were still recognizable. Grass clippings were often green. Any many newspapers were still readable. In fact, they are used to verify when the waste was buried. Now there's a positive. No carbon dating was necessary to determine the age of the gazillion pounds of junk in the landfills.