The London Brick Company's site, with it's kilns, chimneys, conveyors that had made millions of bricks for a hundred or so years.
Go past today and what do you see? A huge and pleasant housing estate, schools (five planned), playing fields,a large shopping complex including a 24 hour supermarket (and even a Police Station) with dual carriageways on two sides.
All built on our discarded rubbish. Tell me what is wrong with that.,,,
Apart from the risks of radon and other evil gasses, subsidence and the general toxicity of the site. the problem with land fill is that it is a finite solution. as you say yourself the holes were the result of a centuries activity, such holes are not created at the the same rate as we produce rubbish. so it will come to finding valleys and then other geographic features to fill.
But even that misses the point. part of the issue is the enormous amount of energy (mainly petrochemical) that is embodied in all of the buried matter. If we become accustomed to being able to simply lose all of that material, just to make it from scratch, everytime we need some more, the use of energy increases.
Considered alongside of most business models ideal, that of steady growth, our demand for newly created stuff will simply keep increasing at a logarithmic rate, and with it our need for more, and larger holes.
It seems to me that any vestige of re-usability that our consumer items have is almost a left over of the old re-usable repairable mentality that most of us grew up with. for instance; razors started of as a lifetime purchase and were sharpenable, then they became re-bladable and the manufacturer saw more profit , the next logical step was disposable (even more profit).
If any self respecting business could make tv sets or power tools that were single use (i.e. no on/off switch) cheaply enough they would because the sales would change from every few years to every week.
It is exactly this escalation that is causing the crisis that we increasingly find ourselves in. you may say that it is not that bad, but when you consider how recently this has become a problem, compared to our presence, even if you only count post industrial urbanised society. The hundred years that the brick fields were in use saw a managed sustainable approach to waste, it is only in the past 50 or so years the advent of a consumer society that these effects have been getting out of control.
So for now there may be nothing wrong with a few people living on rubbish heaps, but the way we are going we will all be doing that, and the future will probably hold a day when we have to go mining the rubbish for the minerals and embodied energy that we cant produce ourselves anymore.
