[ams6110]

> We have plenty of examples where landfills contaminated the groundwater and with it large swaths of ground.

The old "dumps" had this problem. Modern landfills with liners, leachate management, etc. are probably the best way to handle garbage, out of all the possible options. It's simply not possible or even practical to recycle everything.

[freeflight]

Many of those "old dumps" were either exempted or grandfathered from the 1991 implemented federal rules for groundwater quality. The liners sure do help, but they are only a temporary fix because "it's widely recognized that even the best installed plastic liner will succumb to deterioration and eventually will allow leachate to be created and released." [0]

I also never said anything about recycling everything, but at least putting some effort into recycling would already go a long way. According to EPA data [1], the majority of municipal waste disposed of in US landfills is made up of organic materials: 29% paper and paperboard, 27% yard trimmings and food scraps. That's 56% of the landfill of which much could be recycled instead of just being dumped, with composting people can even recycle some of that stuff themselves at home and get some quality fertilizer out of it.

The only thing stopping this from happening is the laziness of people who rather want to dump all their garbage into a single bin/bag and be done with it because waste separation is not considered "practical", even tho there are plenty of countries who've practiced it very successfully for years already and as such are leading the "recycling race"[2].

[0]http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/La-Mi/Landfills-Impact-on-G...

[1]https://archive.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/web/pdf/ms...

[2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2016/03/04/the-co...