Name: The Stinky Truth About How We Deal With Our Trash
Uploaded: 2026-02-03T17:27:28.000Z
Duration: 3 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Bob, are you trying to grow a garbage tree again?

Planting one diet Dr. Blocker drink will not give you a whole tree of them.

That does give me a good idea for a video, though.

Today we're gonna answer the question that I just made up.

Why don't we bury our trash directly into the ground?

We did do a video on why we don't just shoot our trash directly into the sun.

You can watch that video by clicking the link in the description.

To answer this stinky question, let's take a fun little field trip to the dump.

According to the United States Environmental protection agency, in 2018, Americans made 265 metric tons of trash.

While much of that is recycled, composted, burned for energy, or managed by other methods, 50% ended up in landfills.

It may sound like a landfill is just a big hole in the ground where we throw our trash, but

it's actually much more complicated than that, and

You see, rainfall and the trash's natural decomposition process create a toxic liquid called leachate.

This contains many pollutants, including heavy metals and ammonia.

If this got into the soil, it could harm nearby plants and enter the groundwater, which is a major source of our drinking water.

And because a big buried pile of trash doesn't receive much oxygen from the air, the decomposition process generates methane gas and carbon dioxide.

In addition to being a potent greenhouse gas, methane is highly flammable and dangerous if kept sealed beneath the ground.

For these reasons, landfills have to be built in a way that keeps these harmful substances under control.

This begins by finding a suitable place to build it, away from any environmentally sensitive areas like wetlands.

After the hole is dug, a two part liner consisting of compacted clay topped with a high density plastic is installed.

Next comes a system of pipes to collect and transport the leachate and methane gas to treatment facilities.

These systems are continuously monitored to make sure no hazardous chemicals escape.

Once full, the landfill is capped with another liner, then topped with soil and plants, and

Of course, landfills aren't a perfect solution.

The 3,000 active landfills in the US require 7.3 billion square meters.

The liners can also degrade and leak, resulting in a major health risk for anyone that lives nearby.

This is why it's important to use other disposal methods like recycling or composting, and

to avoid single use plastics so that we can decrease the amount of trash and our reliance on landfills.

So do you have any more stinky questions for me to answer?

Click here to watch this video we did on all the times humans almost went extinct.

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You can also check out the team at Lifespan that powers Life Noggin down in the description.