What are the potential effects of land filling on ground water and surface water?
Controlled burns on land were advancements to uncontrolled burning or dumping discards in the rivers, lakes or oceans. With the banning of activities that contributed to air and water pollution, land disposal of discards became the dominant disposal management technology of the seventies. Although most towns had a dumping area, the fires polluted the air, thus sanitary landfill with daily cover instead of daily fires became state of the art. From the sixties to the eighties what was disposed in Landfill was not regulated very well. Early State standards were prescriptive, they said that you cannot impact the environment, but there were no directions on what to do, only what couldn’t happen. We got off to a bad start in California. Organics turn into water during decomposition and heat accelerates this decomposition. The evaporation of water in landfill theory is that day-to-day heat could remove more water than what was in the landfill. But in a covered landfill, the heat actually acce
