Could $100 oil turn dumps into plastic mines?

[phantom power]

Greg Bear wrote a novel where he mentioned mining old landfills with nanotechnology. Here in the real world, it will probably be done the old fashioned way of using poor people in hazardous conditions.

LONDON (Reuters) - Sparked by surging oil, a dramatic rise in the value of old plastic is encouraging waste companies across the world to dig for buried riches in rotting rubbish dumps.

Long a symbol of humanity's throw-away culture, existing landfill sites are now being viewed as mines of potential which as the world population grows could also help bolster the planet's dwindling natural resources.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUKLJ40413520080826

[izquierdista]

1. When trash becomes treasure

Tijuana will be the new Wall Street.

[navarth]

2. yep that's our future....mining the garbage dumps.

OH the humanity.

Enjoy your billions, war profiteers, polluters, oil barons. Sleep well at night, you bastards.

[ramapo]

3. I always wondered when landfill mining would start

It actually seems like a pretty good idea to me, although I imagine there's a lot of toxic nastiness that would have to be processed. The archaeological aspect of landfill mining might be pretty interesting too.

[cornfedyank]

4. don't forget the methane.

stirring the refuse would let the methane escape.

[amandabeech]

7. Doesn't methane production tail off after a douple of dozen years?

If that were the case, then I hope that they start with the oldest sections of the landfills first, coupled with sorting garbage as it comes in to keep anything recyclable out of the landfills to begin with.

I can't wait for more tech to turn used paper towels into ethanol or something else useful.

[XemaSab]

8. I think the production tails off but it's still in there

The way to do it would be to send deep augers into the dump to aerate the lower layers before people went in.

[jdadd]

5. One of my former employers

Was an automotive plastic parts supplier. I was appalled by the tons of rejected parts that were sent to the local county land fill. They would re grind only about 15% of rejects, the rest were just scrapped.

[Warpy]

6. Nanotechnology, bacteria or thermal depolymerization

All have the possibility of turning leaking, stinking landfills into crude oil deposits.

It's hard to tell what's worse, though, non biodegradable plastic choking the landfill or more CO2 into the atmosphere.

Clearly, we're going to have to keep pushing toward increasing renewable energy output even if mining the landfill becomes commercially viable.

[GreenPartyVoter]

9. I have long thought that we will wind up mining our landfills