The Mine 2091
A gentle mist rises over the grass in the not-too-early morning. The maple trees are that light shade of green they only get in the spring. A few dogwood trees mix in with the last of their blooms showing off.
The daughter, son, mother and father park with a view of this tree filled landscape in the foothills of the Berkshires. The father turns their electric car off with a voice command, and they all get out.
“Why would anyone have put a landfill here?” the daughter asks. “It’s too beautiful of a place to dump trash.”
“That wasn’t how they decided those things then. It was happenstance or laziness or something else,” her dad says.
They walk up the eco concrete walkway and go into the low visitor’s center.
***
“Welcome to the Berkshire Landfill Mine. We’re so honored you’ve chosen to use your time to learn more about our operations first hand. The 9:30 am tour will begin over by the plastic bottle cap sculpture.”
The tour guide groups everyone together and they walk past the reception area through a door to a balcony. Enclosed with glass, it overlooks a warehouse where trolly carts hold piles of different materials – metal wire, glass bottles, shredded strips of fabric, ground plastic pellets, aluminum cans scrubbed clean of paint and crushed flat, large sheets of steel rolled up like taquitos, treads of car tires cut in long pieces like textured noodles.
“We’re starting a bit back to front. In the first stop of our tour, you’ll see the materials we mine from this former landfill almost ready to be sent on for re-manufacture. Everything has been sorted, cleaned, grouped, and weighed. As orders come in, we’ll ship the materials to factories around the country and in some cases around the world, although most countries now have their own landfill mining operations as well.”
“What’s the most valuable thing you mine?”
“That’s a great question, sir. We often find old coins, which are of course at least worth their own value as currency, but are also sometimes worth more based on what metal they’re made of. We find jewelry with precious stones and precious metal. Again, the condition may be good or poor, and that determines how we value the material. Let’s say a ruby ring. In good condition, it can go to a resale company. Poor condition, we separate the ruby, sell that, separate the gold, sell that.
“Any other questions? No?” Now we’ll head outside to see the beginning of the process of landfill mining.”
The group heads outdoors, to an observation deck. Digital telescopes stand along the railing and the view overlooks an open landfill mine. Backhoes and all terrain vehicles move back and forth across a terrace cut out of a low hill. Even from a distance, it’s easy to see that the hill is not made of dirt or stone, but of a mix of garbage – a dense heap of garbage bags, appliance parts, lumber, old mattresses, old tires.
The son turns to the mother in amazement, “Mom, I think I see a whole bicycle!”
The daughter joins in the game, “I see it, and also some sort of pink box.”
“I think that’s a Barbie dream house,” the mother says. “My grandmother had one she kept from when she was a little girl.”
“Everyone here?” the guide asks. “Great. Just pull that door closed. The sensor is broken today. As you can see, we’re un-filling this landfill. We haven’t found a better way to mine than to simply scrape and sort. But we have found that about 30% of what is in the landfill is compostable. So we can refill the mine after we’ve reached the bottom layer. You might be surprised that anything compostable remains, but so much of the compostable material was disposed of and buried in non-compostable containers – fast food boxes from the 1970s and 1980s, plastic garbage bags, plastic cartons and bottles.
“You can see that the mining vehicles are taking the unsorted landfill material to the conveyor belts and then into our sorting facility. That’s where we’ll go next, but before we do you’ll need ear protection and respiration filter masks.”
A second mining employee stands at the far end of the observation deck and hands the safety gear to each tour guest. Ears, noses and mouths covered, they board a large elevator and descend to the sorting facility on the ground floor.
They’re in another separated observation area, this time a balcony overlooking a room busy with activity. Miners pull levers that move bins of landfill contents to an assembly line of sorting machines.
“Now we sort. Anyone a baker? The sorting is essentially sifting. We filter the materials through smaller and smaller sieves to determine what we have. The goal is to get everything into as basic a material as possible. Sometimes we have to help the process along, with our grinders. These take very complicated trash like cell phones or vehicles and allow us to sort their components more easily with our magnetic robots, our density shakers, and all the other methods we use.
“On the far end of the room you can see the composting line, which takes the food waste and plant materials and paper pulp through a pasteurization and sterilization process and then out to our composting barn to turn back into soil.
“In the middle of the room you can see the metals and plastics processing lines. And you can also see the diversion conveyor for what we call the mystery line. This is the most dangerous part of our process, where we take materials we can’t identify or that we suspect are hazardous and determine if they can be reclaimed or if they need to be classified as biohazards, carcinogens, or worthless but better off incinerated.
“This is a very small portion of our total mined materials, but we regret how much we find. Previous generations just didn’t have the knowledge of garbagology and recycling that we do today.”
“Is there anything you just can’t identify?”
“Rarely, but sometimes we need to bring in a historian or some other specialist to identify a difficult find. Sometimes they turn out to be works of art, or even sometimes they are school projects from a science fair or robotics team.”
The group takes a final look and then leaves the balcony and enters a small gallery. On their way, they return their ear protection and masks.
“This is the mine museum. We’ve put some of our favorite finds here, like a very small sampling of the LEGO bricks we found starting in the 2020s level, the telephones from the 1990s level, the cigarette filters from the 1960s level, a trove of army surplus from the 1950s level – including a photo of a quonset hut roof – and the slate roof tiles from the 1910s and earlier.”
The son, daughter, father and mother browse the exhibits, taking a few pictures with their camera rings, and pointing out their favorites.
“Of course the tour isn’t over. There’s one more stop we want you to visit: You’ll exit through the gift shop.”