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Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

These kind of places always seem so surreal. They’re like a place you’re not supposed to go, a place where deleted things end up. No humans around except for a few scavengers. Where are some other interesting remote dumping grounds like this where piles of discarded items just sit around abandoned? Is there a dry desert somewhere with a bunch of old beige computers just laying around?

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Garbage can be found just about anywhere now. There is a TV show called Alone where people try to survive off the land in remote locations. There’s a limit to how much stuff a person can bring with them but they are allowed to use any items they find. In almost every season someone finds something that was dumped. The whole world is becoming a garbage dump. There are giant garbage patches in the oceans now. It’s disconcerting that we have done so much damage to the planet.

A film (well worth watching) about this sort of place is Manufactured Landscapes: https://archive.org/details/ManufacturedLandscapes_201902 -- you don't really get the whole scale of things until you see something like this.

Trivia note: This movie has the longest opening tracking shot of any movie of the time (according to a film professor friend).

Thank you! I will try to watch it :)

Remember watching this maybe 15 years ago. Really impactful film.

Sorry to get stuck on your trivia note. What is the definition of a tracking shot? Russian Ark by Sokurov from 2002 is one continous 87 minute take.

The movie 1917 is one continuous 2 hour take.

If you mean this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_(2019_film) it was many long shots edited to look like two continuous takes (there's a deliberate fade to black at one point). According to this (https://theasc.com/articles/lives-under-siege-the-goldfinch-...) it was filmed over four months.

The weird thing to me is that we have those places everywhere and don't think twice about it. The only difference is that we cover the garbage with dirt. They are called "landfills" but they are really just mountains of garbage.

Sometimes we even give them really nice names:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yumenoshima

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yumeshima

(Both places' names translate to Dream Island.)

There are other differences. The garbage being discussed was sorted, baled, and shipped to markets with the pretense that it was going the be recycled or reused. (To be fair, a fraction of it was.) It diverted garbage away from our landfills, dumping it where it was beyond "out of sight, out of mind." The intent is entirely different.

Actual landfills are, at least where I live, heavily regulated and use quite a lot of technology and engineering to minimize their impact. And landfilling itself is actually being abandoned here, AFAIK you can’t start a new landfill anymore and the costs of landfilling will be artificially jacked up in order to soften the final ban in ~6 years.

Meaning you're about to start exporting a lot of garbage to jurisdictions with laxer regulations on landfills?

Exactly. Such a policy doesn't do anything to curb the amount of waste. It just shifts it to poorer regions and lines Mafia pockets with money

Ideally this should lead to an uptick in recycling and switch the rest to incineration (and electricity generation).

Incineration is worse than landfills?

Are you asking if it is?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/309th_Aerospace_Maintenance_an... springs to mind, although it doesn't quite fit the bill!

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