Rubish waste

Composition studies of municipal solid waste reveal that it consists of between 34 and 59 per cent degradable carbon. Therefore, America's population of about 269.6 million will have produced in 1997 about 210.3 million short tons of solid waste containing between 71.5 and 124 million tons of degradable carbon. Other countries have waste-generation rates similar to the United States. In other words, appropriately constructed landfills could capture roughly 2 billion tons of carbon annually, thus stopping global warming cold. For many years, biodegradability was considered a good thing --garbage would be reduced to rich dark humus, and landfills would not overrun the earth. But in the process of turning garbage into soil, decomposition returns most of the carbon to the atmosphere as methane and carbon dioxide -- greenhouse gases.