Helena Da Silva Maciel Xavier

Americans tossed 292.4 million tons of trash into landfills in 2018, or about 5 pounds of garbage per person per day. Once in a landfill, much of that trash undergoes some wild chemistry, often polluting the surrounding area. But amid all the stinking refuse is potentially valuable material, and some environmentalists and engineers see landfills as a resource to be tapped. This Summer’s Hottest UmbrellaLandfill mining is the process of uncapping a landfill and sifting through its cells of garbage to reclaim any sort of…