Soaring Oil Prices May Spawn Industrial Landfill Mining

The escalating cost of oil-derived plastics is causing waste management companies to consider “landfill mining” to retrieve plastic garbage that could be converted to liquid fuel or recycled. Valuable plastics such as high-density polyethelenes have doubled in value in the past year, and with oil at more than $100 a barrel, mining dump sites for old plastic has started to look financially feasible. Millions of tons of plastic were thrown away before recycling became commonplace; experts estimate that in the U.K. alone 200 million tons of old plastic, worth up to $120 billion, could be recovered. Other commodities, such as scrap metal, also can be retrieved from dumps. Waste management industry leaders will meet in London in October for the world’s first landfill mining conference. Recycling activists say that the real solution to the resource crisis is not developing technology to salvage garbage from landfills but avoiding tossing the plastic in the first place.