https://phys.org/news/2023-12-uncontrolled-chemical-reactions-fuel-crises.html
Hundreds of feet underground, in a long-dormant portion of Chiquita Canyon landfill, tons of garbage have been smoldering for months due to an enigmatic chemical reaction.
They don't have the market for 11 million tons of waste to compost? Isn't California one of the major food producers in the world?
Also, even if they don't or can't use that much, isn't compost effectively just dirt? A canyon full of compost has to be better than one full of random shit.
I recently asked about this while touring a landfill in northern California.
Only some types of waste can be composted, and large scale compost buyers are very picky about what went into the compost. Residential compost tends to have very unpredictable contents, so it's basically impossible to sell it to anyone but small businesses or individuals, and some of these programs end up giving it away for free.
But yeah I don't think most of this could be turned into compost anyway, especially at this scale.
I used to do work at a municipal dump.
A few years before I started, the biggest city in the municipality started a composting program. They built a large industrial sized building to put the compostable waste into while it rotted away.
The ammonia from the waste was so bad that they had to abandon the project. All of the metal beams in the building were rusting out by the time I had gotten there.
They ended up shipping that waste to be someone else's problem.
At my local landfill they got a waiver to bury radioactive fracking waste. There are new homes on a golf course within a quarter mile of it.