Of particular concern is the wastewater created inside landfills as leachate. But according to the Environmental Research Foundation in Annapolis, Maryland, clay will dry and crack over time, HDPE will degrade with household chemicals, and composite liners made from clay and plastic will leak somewhere between 0.2 and 10 gallons a day after ten years. They're saying that they could break down in a 30-year time frame. It's clearly a concern and we have asked the EPA to revisit their regulations in that light. To be fair, however, recycling doesn't clear every environmental hurdle either.
Products remade from recycled waste such as paper and plastic go through a chemical process.
Paper recycling also uses thousands of gallons of water. Compared to making paper from virgin materials, however, recycling is clearly more responsible to the environment. In addition to the hundreds of highly toxic chemicals used in papermaking such as chlorine, dioxin and furan, consider what it takes to harvest a forest, build logging roads, and cut and haul trees. The paper recycling industry alone saves 17 trees for every ton of paper it keeps out of the landfill. In 1996 America recovered 42.3 million tons of paper, saving more than 719 million trees.