Surface water, oceans and landfills are traditionally the main repositories for society's solid and hazardous waste. Landfills are located in excavated areas such as sand and gravel pits or in valleys that are near waste generators. They have...

The term sanitary landfill was first used in the 1930s to refer to the compacting of solid waste materials. Initially adopted by New York City and Fresno, California, the sanitary landfill used heavy earth-moving equipment to compress waste materials...

The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) defines solid waste as garbage, refuse, sludge from sewage treatment plants, ash from incinerators, mining waste, construction and demolition materials. It also includes some small quantities of...

A landfill is a large area of land or an excavated site that is designed and built to receive wastes. There were 3,536 active municipal landfills in the United States in 1995 according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Today, about 55...

A landfill, also known as a dump or tip (and historically as a midden), is a site for the disposal of waste materials by burial and is the oldest form of waste treatment. Historically, landfills have been the most common methods of organized waste...

Limited information is available on the public health effects of landfills despite widely-publicized cases such as the Indian epidemic. Landfill operators continue to neglect the prevention of untreated leachate infiltration into groundwater and the capturing, burning or use of gaseous emissions. Stricter environmental rules...

Sanitary landfill issues, particularly on the aspects of environmental protection and compliance to federal requirements, have become popular themes of several discussions. One paper entitled, 'Questions That Regulatory Agencies Staff, Board and Landfill Applicants and Their Consultants Should Answer About a Proposed Subtitle D...

The controversy over the biggest dump for Hurricane Katrina debris got a lot messier with a lawsuit claiming the city and the landfill's operators illegally used private land.The suit is the latest in the saga of the Old Gentilly Landfill, an old municipal dump the...

One Staten Island politician apparently doesn't have a sweet tooth for a locally-made vanilla ice cream with brownie chunks and cherries.That's because the ice cream in question, marketed under the moniker "Staten Island Landfill," is "insulting and derogatory," borough president James Molinaro wrote in a...

America produces more trash than any other country in the world. How does this affect us and the world we live in? What kind of actions are being taken and what the average person can do to make a difference?