People’s trash is all over the place; I know that my family has to take the garbage out at least once a week. If you figure that all the families, big or small, take out their garbage, you’d think it would just see it pile up in the street only after a few weeks. But we obviously don’t see it all in the streets or in our back yards. Where does it all go? Surely there’s not a big trash monster that eats it all up for us…. Or is there?

In actuality, there is a sort of trash monster lurking in the dark. You can see his tentacles, in the form of garbage trucks, roaming the avenues in search of more garbage. Early in the morning you can hear him grumble and lumber as your garbage disappears as he drags it back to his lair. Like any monster in the dark, not many good things can come of him. And it is through a cage that we keep him at bay.

When you think of a landfill, you usually think of a massive pile of rubbish just sitting there and rotting away for eternity, a cage for the beast. Some landfills are that disgusting, a sewage pit of waste and stink, the monster uncontained and foiling the countryside. We have done a lot toward containing this monster, but have we been doing enough? A good landfill, called a Municipal waste Landfill, is a giant pit for the monster, with thick walls to keep in its stench and giant reservoirs to hold back its slime. It is very organized dungeon for the waste, a modern and scientific containment area for our trash. But the monster is always there, filling the pits, multiplying itself. Some of the biggest man made structures are not the giant towers of brick and mortar, the tallest bridge or longest wall, It is the heaps of trash that collect to stew in these landfills.

I have always thought of landfills as places like a giant compost heap, where the garbage would deteriorate and break down till the ground was fit to grow plants on. A gallant and useful way for disposing of our filth, these landfills. Or so I thought till I really looked into them. Their name says it all, a big fill of land, nothing more, and nothing less. The garbage just sits there for eternity. You’d think that some microbes would get in and try to decompose it, but most of the microbes need some form of oxygen to break stuff down, which needless to say, is in small supply in the packed earth. In fact, they try not to have decomposition, as it usually causes the landfill to fall apart. In excavations of ancient landfills, even a good 40-60 years old, they still provide newspapers still quite legible and non-depreciate (from a report to the times). The monster’s pollutants and mess still quite dangerous and active, even the decommissioned ones.

All of this is all brought about on how they are designed. You’d have to get in the mindset of what a landfill maker would be thinking in order to really understand how and why, so I’ll tell you what you might do. The first thing you’d look for is a good spot, with a good 100-acre area, with an additional 40 acres all around as a buffer area. Then you’d have to test the water tables to make sure none of the run-off from the land fill would go into any vital areas, such as parks or human places. After all this was checked and double-checked, (it’d have to be, since landfills are quite poisonous to places), you’d set about with digging. A Deep and large hole would be dug, after which you’d put in a "barrier" made of some type of resistant material. Then and a visitor center would be built, where the garbage would be dropped off. After fending off the picketers because of the NIMBY effects (Not In My Back Yard), the area would become active. After only a few days the garbage would start piling up. Of course being as smart as you are, you’d be sure to compact the garbage and make sectional areas and fill it over with dirt incrementally. After a while, you’d have no more space, and would either add on with more holes, or decommission it.

Although this sounds like it would work, and be pretty efficient at keeping the monster at bay, nothing is perfect. That’s the problem with these landfills, there aren’t enough, and the ones we got are getting full. With 6 billon people in this world, the landfills are at their maximum. We may have more space for landfills, but do we want to eventually sacrifice all of your cherished land to landfills? Another problem with landfills is their containment. Some do surprisingly well at containing the crud, but NONE of them have 100% containment, its scientifically impossible. After extensive studies done by some of the top scientists, they concluded that due to the chaotic nature of barriers, it’s practically impossible to get a perfect one. Even plastic and rock have microscopic cracks, and with so much garbage, some of it is bound to get through.

The stuff going through the cracks is called "leachate". Leachate is basically rainwater that percolates like a coffee machine through the landfill and seeps out. Although it comes in clean, the rainwater collects all the metals and brown stuff and other nasty matter, and comes out a brown and pungent sewage that stains the ground and has easily 100 times the amount of heavy metals for it to be considered highly poisonous.

Alas, landfills are the best things we have, and we aren’t able to do anything better. We just have to live with them and protect ourselves from the monster we created. We can do things to help cut down on the stuff in landfills, you can recycle and reuse whenever possible. It is also suggested that you dispose of certain materials appropriately, since batteries and motor oil contribute to the pollutants in the leachate. So the next time you think about throwing away your garbage, think about if you can do anything about it. Anything can help and I’m sure you could contact your local government on where you can dispose and recycle you trash. I know that my family has recently started to recycle, as easy as having separate garbage cans for different things. Help stop feeding the monster, let it perish and diminish into one of those great greek myths of old.