Their argument was NEVER valid, Penn and Teller never addressed how long this trash actually takes to break down (Estimates are as high as 10,000) years. This means for 10,000 years you would need to inspect the landfill every year, and repair it when the landfill breaks.
In actuality what will happen is that all these buried landfills will break, all the bad stuff will leak out and enter the ground water. The groundwater becomes polluted, the plants start dying. And you end up with dead dirt that nothing will grow in.
The people advocating for landfills now, are not going to be around 500 years from now to see the results of their selfish thinking.
The primary issue is that we took elements naturally found in nature and used them to create manmade synthetic material, that nature has no tools to deal with. And these manmade synthetic material will eventually break down small enough to the point where quantum forces take over (nanoscale sized particles) and enter the groundwater. And plants and animals will drink in these manmade synthetic materials the size of nanometers, and the body has nothing that can breakdown or deal with these manmade synthetic materials. Putting a piece of shit into icecream and mixing it is easy. Unmixing a icecream mixed with shit to remove the shit is scientifically impossible.
For billions of years, high-density elements (lead, cadmium, mercury, rare earth elements, arsenic) were locked away in solid mineral ores, buried under hundreds of feet of rock. Surface biology only ever encountered them as faint, background trace elements.
We mined gigatons of these ores, refined them to near-100% purity, combined them with synthetic chemicals, and packed them into hyper-dense landfill cells right above or near freshwater aquifers.
Landfills are fundamentally a temporal transfer mechanism. They take the immediate waste generated by modern high-consumption lifestyles—cheap electronics, disposable packaging, synthetic textiles, convenience goods—and bury it out of sight, converting a present-day logistical crisis into a slow-motion geological problem for future generations.
