Let me go back to Barcelona and some of the other Spanish examples where they have actually outlawed landfills and have actually said you must recycle all of your old landfills.
The problem is that when they take the cap off, now they have a chemical cocktail and they have no idea what they're dealing with. In one case it created a plume of dangerous gas, which killed the cap operator that opened it. They had to evacuate a whole community because of this toxic gas. They didn't know that was going to happen. So you don't know what's in there. And remember: the old landfills had no liners. Those are leaking and seeping into adjacent land. We have a huge liability out there.
In the case of our landfills, if a landfill is up to about 10 years old, I'm told that it still has enough energy value in it to be recycled. You could dig up an eight- or ten-year-old landfill and turn it into value. Anything older than that and you have such a mix of chemicals and a loss of energy that it might not be economical. But maybe you have to do it anyway.
In the case of Spain, what they've done is drilled holes and put gas collectors in. They collect liquid and gas, and then they treat it to try to decontaminate it. Those pipes are like three feet apart and there are hundreds of miles of pipe throughout that landfill. It's a very costly process.
Should we be dealing with it? Yes, but let's deal with the new garbage first.