Terra Incognita: Speculative Landfill Futures

Abstract

The amount of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) the world produces far exceeds our current infrastructural capacity. The things we throw away, while arguably benign individually, are dangerous once accumulated in large quantities. Instead of fearing this increase of waste and lack of solutions, we should use it as a catalyst to promote new policies and strategies to change waste management systems. What kind of design opportunities will post-closure landfills present in the future? The possible future in which this thesis explores combines elements of the probable and plausible but radically reimagines the perceptions, policies, and economics surrounding our current waste management systems – creating the possible. Taking inspiration from Ecotopia, the setting for the Cedar Hills Regional Landfill re-design imagines a world in which people value waste as a resource and public utility, believe in circularity, and feel a responsibility to heal that which we have polluted. Keeping waste local and processing it in a sustainable way is a priority. The CHRLF of the future combines enhanced landfill mining with waste to energy and waste to material technology to create a circular system in which both incoming waste and buried waste are a resource. People feel a responsibility to remove the harmful toxins they have buried in the earth and try to restore the superfund site. Sorting and composting waste before the incineration process, gives waste a chance at a second life. Much of waste sent to landfills is biodegradable food material that was never sorted in the first place. With an industrial composting facility directly to the south of the CHRLF, the nutrients in this material can be used again. Combining this compost with fly ash from incineration, will create a soil mixture that will then be placed back inside the landfill. The whole site can then be used as a research facility, a giant experiment, to conduct phytoremediation trials to begin the healing process. The CHRLF can then become a model for what landfills of the future can become.