Landfill mining is superficially attractive.   But before we get bombarded by articles expounding the virtues of landfill mining, let me burst a few bubbles. 

The idealistic wax enthusiastic about the amount of metal and plastic in landfills across the country.  In theory if we could get at these resources, we would have a bonanza.  But can we?

I once stripped the soil cover off a landfill in Los Angeles as part of the construction of an engineered soil cover.  The landfill is the Operating Industries Inc. (OII) landfill and admittedly is a Superfund site.  But it is big and old and contains vast quantities of paper, metal, and plastic.  I saw intact newspapers from the fifties.  I saw complete fridges and stoves coming out as we stripped the cover and exposed the waste.  We concluded that the plastic is what held the waste intact against earthquakes at an amazing 1.4 horizontal to 1.0 vertical side slope nearly 300-ft high. 

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Is the mining boom over?  Are we descending into another of those times when the mining industry hangs on by the skin of its teeth?  A time when miners and engineers and truck drivers loose their jobs and investors their shirts?  We have seen it all before.  In 1983 and again after that. 

It is all so eerily familiar:  every bigwig at every conference is telling you gold will go to $1,000 and $2,000 an ounce.  Every bottom feeder is telling you that there are not enough people to go around.  Every academic is telling you they need more funding to train more students.  Consultants do not return your calls, for they are too busy cooking up NI43-101s.  Intelligent magazines publish on the Supercycle that will take us to unprecedented heights of metal productivity and better living.

Then one report after another, the share price falls, the cost of gold drops, a bank fails, a few thousand starve to death, one country invades another, China fakes the Olympic opening ceremony, and they blame it all on imprudent home buyers in California. 

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