40 Fun Facts About Landfills

Atari's 1983 landfill burial at Alamogordo, New Mexico, was long rumoured to hold millions of copies of which game?

E.T. cartridges did surface when the site was dug up in 2014, but as part of about 700,000 games of many titles, not the rumoured millions.

In 2013 James Howells threw away a hard drive, now deep in a Newport landfill, that unlocks 8,000 units of what?

Bitcoin worth a fortune is locked on the drive, but Newport's council has refused to let him dig, citing landfill gases and pollution risks.

The Corona Ash Dumps in Queens, later cleared to make Flushing Meadows park, appear as a valley of ashes in which novel?

The Great Gatsby made the dump famous in 1925; it was later levelled and rebuilt as the grounds of the 1939 New York World's Fair.

In which Pixar film are Woody and Buzz hauled by garbage truck to a waste plant and tipped towards its incinerator?

Toy Story 3 sends the gang down a conveyor belt at the tip, and they are saved at the last moment when the Aliens lift them out with an industrial crane.

Monte Testaccio, a hill built from some 53 million discarded olive oil jars, is an ancient rubbish heap in which city?

Rome was then the world's largest city, with at least a million people, and the mountain of broken jars shows how much olive oil it got through.

The shore near Fort Bragg, California, used as the town dump until 1967, became famous for being covered in what?

Sea glass, tumbled smooth by the waves from years of dumped bottles and pottery, is slowly dwindling as the surf keeps grinding it down.

The Recycled Orchestra, whose children play instruments built from landfill scrap, comes from Cateura in which country?

Paraguay's young musicians have shared stages with Stevie Wonder and Metallica, playing instruments such as a violin made from an old pan and a fork.

Which company buried about 2,700 of its unsold Lisa computers in a guarded landfill in Logan, Utah, in 1989?

Apple dumped the machines to claim a tax write-off on unsold stock, with the reseller Sun Remarketing helping to arrange the burial.

Fresh Kills, the world's largest landfill from 1955 until it closed in 2001, lies in which part of New York City?

Staten Island was promised a three-year temporary dump on worthless swampland in 1948; it ran for more than half a century instead.

Shoreline Amphitheatre, built on a California landfill whose gas set its lawn alight, is shaped like which band's logo?

Grateful Dead fans can pick out the band's emblem in the layout chosen by promoter Bill Graham; gas wells were drilled before the second season to stop the fires.

The Mobro 4000, which hauled New York rubbish as far as Belize in 1987 with nowhere willing to take it, was what?

A barge towed by a tug, it carried over 3,100 tons of rubbish for months before a court agreed the load could be incinerated in Brooklyn.

Which birds, drawn in thousands to Israel's Hiriya landfill, became a hazard to airliners at nearby Ben Gurion Airport?

Gulls flocked to the rotting rubbish beside the flight path; the dump shut in 1998 and its flat-topped hill is now the heart of Ariel Sharon Park.

Which New York airport, opened to the public in 1939, was built on fill moved from the Rikers Island rubbish dump?

LaGuardia stands on fill that had to be laid over a metal reinforcing framework, on a waterfront site first used for flying a decade earlier.

Archaeologist William Rathje dug into landfills and found which decades-old items still as readable as when printed?

Newspapers barely rot once buried, his digs showed, overturning the belief that paper breaks down quickly in a landfill.

What is traditionally spread over each day's rubbish at a landfill to hold down smells, pests and windblown litter?

Soil is the classic 'daily cover', and it also slows fires and keeps rain out; some sites now use green waste, paper sludge or shredded tyres instead.

The bacteria that make methane deep in a landfill get to work only once the buried rubbish runs out of what?

Oxygen buried with fresh rubbish is used up first by other microbes, and typically within a year the methane-makers have taken over.

Hydrogen sulfide, a trace ingredient of landfill gas, is known for a foul smell usually compared to what?

Rotten eggs is the classic description; even trace amounts in the air carry the odour, though the gas is under 1% of what a landfill gives off.

Landfill gas is roughly half methane, with which other greenhouse gas making up nearly all of the rest?

Carbon dioxide and methane are both made by microbes digesting the waste, but methane traps many times more heat over a century.

Artist Vik Muniz made art from rubbish with the pickers of Jardim Gramacho, a vast landfill outside which city?

Rio de Janeiro's dump, once among the largest in the world, closed in 2012; the project became the Oscar-nominated documentary Waste Land.

Thilafushi, an artificial island made in the 1990s by filling a lagoon with the capital's rubbish, is in which nation?

Maldives officials chose the lagoon west of Malé in 1991, and the growing island has since drawn boat-building, cement packing and warehousing.

World Cup Park opened in 2002 on Nanjido, a former island that spent fifteen years as a landfill for which capital city?

Seoul tipped its rubbish there from 1978 to 1993, then turned the site into five parks, among them Haneul (Sky) Park, in time for the football tournament.

The 'Kills' in Fresh Kills, New York's giant former landfill, comes from a word for a water channel in which language?

Dutch colonists of New Netherland scattered the word across the Hudson and Delaware valleys, which is why the region's maps are dotted with 'kills'.

Beneath the plastic membrane, modern landfill liners rely on a compacted layer of which dense natural material?

Clay lets water through so slowly that it backs up the membrane; many sites use sodium bentonite sandwiched between two sheets of geotextile.

What name is given to the contaminated liquid that forms as rain seeps through a landfill and pools above the liner?

Leachate carries heavy metals and a heavy load of ammonium, which builds up because the airless waste cannot clear nitrogen the way ordinary ground does.

In the EPA's 2018 breakdown of what Americans send to landfill, which category was the largest at about 24 percent?

Food made up almost a quarter of landfilled rubbish, ahead of plastics at over 18 percent, and rotting leftovers are a big reason landfills give off methane.

Mount Trashmore, a landfill reborn in 1974 as a park drawing over a million visitors a year, is in which US city?

Virginia Beach counts it as the city's most popular park, and its skate park has hosted professionals including Tony Hawk.

Landfill Tax, brought in by environment secretary John Gummer in 1996, was the first environmental tax in which country?

The UK followed the logic of a 'sin tax': make burying waste dearer than the alternatives, and less of it gets buried.

Mount Rumpke, a landfill that forms the highest landform in Ohio's Hamilton County, rises just north of which city?

Cincinnati's rubbish has raised the mound to 1,075 feet above sea level, and a 1996 lightning strike started a fire there that burned for six days.

Smokey Mountain, a two-million-tonne landfill shut in 1995 and replaced with public housing, stood in which capital?

Manila's Tondo district lived beside the dump for at least 50 years, and fires fed by its decomposing waste cost many lives.

What is the term for burning off collected landfill gas at a stack, the minimum US law demands of many large landfills?

Flaring turns the methane into less potent gases, but it wastes a fuel that many sites instead pipe to engines to generate electricity.

Landfill compactors, the heavy tractors that drive over each day's rubbish, run on steel wheels covered in what?

Spikes let the machine tear and squeeze the rubbish as it rolls, and tighter packing is what makes a landfill last longer.

Which California city's dump, America's first modern sanitary landfill, became a National Historic Landmark in 2001?

Fresno engineer Jean Vincenz pioneered digging trenches, compacting the rubbish and burying it daily from 1937, largely to keep rats away.

Which planner backed New York's Fresh Kills dump and in the 1950s tried to extend a Brooklyn shore with buried garbage?

Robert Moses saw the dump as a route to new parkland and highways; on the Brooklyn bay his cover washed away, and the rubbish shows on the shore at low tide.

Yumenoshima, built on landfilled rubbish in Tokyo Bay and host of archery at the 2020 Olympics, has a name meaning what?

Dream Island took the city's rubbish from 1957; the park on top now holds a tropical botanical garden, a yacht marina and a stadium.

West Lake Landfill, where Manhattan Project uranium waste was illegally dumped in 1973, lies outside which US city?

St. Louis suburb Bridgeton hosts the site, now a federal Superfund clean-up, and an underground fire smouldering about 1,000 feet away drew fresh scrutiny.

Which type of landfill recirculates its own liquid or pumps in air so that buried waste breaks down far faster?

Bioreactor sites speed up decades of slow decay, which cuts the cost of treating liquid and replacing liners while boosting the methane available for energy.

Deonar, India's oldest and largest dumping ground, set up in 1927 and piled 18 storeys high by 2014, serves which city?

Mumbai's civic body runs the site, where recurrent fires have driven neighbours in Chembur to protest, once with a hunger strike.

Which island nation buries its incinerator ash at Semakau, an offshore landfill built among its southern islands?

Singapore opened Semakau as its first offshore landfill, and it is now the only landfill the country has left.

Which comedy film has two frozen test subjects unearthed in the year 2505 when a mountain-sized garbage pile collapses?

Idiocracy wakes its 'most average' army librarian five hundred years after a hibernation experiment that was meant to last one year.

César Chávez Park, where grassy hills over a 1950s landfill are popular for flying kites, is in which California city?

Berkeley built dikes on the bay shore in 1957 to hold municipal waste, then in 1969 set the filled land aside for open recreation.