On 27 Oct 2005 04:42:30 -0700, wrote:

"There is likely a recycling yard not too far from you. I wouldn't look
at it
a "would it pay for the gas" argument. Copper is a finite resource,
much
rarer than iron, steel, and aluminum, and should not be tossed, just
for
conservation reasons alone, not to mention that in a landfill
environment
copper salts leach out of landfill, potentially poisoning groundwater
reservoirs."

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Burn gas and wear out the car just
to take some scrap to a recycling center, regardless of whether you get
enough money to make it worthwhile? I guess oil isn't a finite
resource? And as for not tossing it in the trash for safety reasons,
that's just plain crazy. Just look at all the other streams of various
types of trash that are legally going into landfills, many of them
containing copper and far worse. Household batteries for example.
The leachate from all landfills contains all kinds of toxins and has to
be contained today with a liner. Whether this guy's copper pipe winds
up there or not isn't going to make any difference. It's fairly
likely the copper would be recovered at the waste facility anyway,
prior to the trash going into the landfill. That's what's done here in
NJ.

I predict, in the future, when raw materials become scarce, we will be
returning to all our landfills. We won't call them "landfills" or
"dumps", by then they'll be known as "mines".

Invest in your future, buy a defunct landfill, do it for the
children...

DJ