page_title: Landfill
section_title: Landfill gas
hierarchical_section_title: Landfill / Landfill gas
caption_attribution_description: English: A gas flare produced by a landfill in Lake County, Ohio. The landfill was closed in 1993, but trash decomposition and gas flaring continues into 2019, and is expected to continue for many more decades.
context_page_description: A landfill site, also known as a tip, dump, rubbish dump, garbage dump, or dumping ground, is a site for the disposal of waste materials. Landfill is the oldest and most common form of waste disposal, although the systematic burial of the waste with daily, intermediate and final covers only began in 1940s. In the past, refuse was simply left in piles or thrown into pits; in archeology this is known as a midden.
  Some landfill sites are also used for waste management purposes, such as temporary storage, consolidation and transfer, or for various stages of processing waste material, such as sorting, treatment, or recycling. Unless they are stabilized, landfills may experience severe shaking or soil liquefaction of the ground during a large earthquake.
context_section_description: Gases are produced in landfills due to the anaerobic digestion by microbes. In a properly managed landfill this gas is collected and used. Its uses range from simple flaring to the landfill gas utilization and generation of electricity. Landfill gas monitoring alerts workers to the presence of a build-up of gases to a harmful level. In some countries, landfill gas recovery is extensive; in the United States, for example, more than 850 landfills have active landfill gas recovery systems.
caption: A gas flare produced by a landfill in Lake County, Ohio
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