First a little history: World War II was the driving force in pushing Americans out of the Great Depression. The government poured money into the economy to make military equipment. When WWII ended, Americans used their revived economy (since Europe wasn't very economically stable at this point in history) to produce more and more goods. Urban growth accelerated at an astounding rate, and with it came the "refuse generation".As people became concerned with the air pollution that came with burning garbage, more and more of the waste ended up in landfills. These landfills were very primitive back in the mid-1900's. For example, a landfill in California studied by the University of California in 1949 was basically a scattering of trash over a large area, allowing scavengers easy access and pigs were often let out in the landfill for some free overnight feeding. People came to realize that letting pigs eat pure trash was highly unsanitary, and the government worked to make a "sanitary landfill". They researched through the 1940's and 1950's. Slowly, the modern landfill came out. The most obvious difference between this sanitary landfill and other dumping methods is the daily cover that they put over the trash (1). However, this cover restricts air flow, so decomposition occurs very, very slowly. In fact, newspapers over 40 years old have been found in landfills so well preserved that you can still read off of them (2). In 1965, the federal government passed the Solid Waste Disposal Act in an attempt to introduce sanitary landfill practices. Fast forward to 1976 when Congress realized that the landfill issue needed more attention, and directed EPA to specify criteria for classifying landfills under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. From there on, the EPA made little major decisions concerning landfills, focusing more on the non-landfill methods of managing wastes (1). Here we are now, with more trash than ever and a steadily decreasing amount of places to put it.
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