well-managed landfill. I may be wrong, but it seems like landfill technology (is there such a term?) has gotten pretty good. They occupy relatively little space, and can be capped off and the land reused. The big problem has been the overall volume of waste, which could be reduced significantly, and recycling itself. I've read, though I don't have a citation at my fingertips, that most of the plastics in the oceans originate from a handful of rivers in Asia. And the speculation is that a lot of the stuff that was being sent to China for recycling simply gets dumped into rivers and swept out to sea. So all this time, people who thought they were doing the environment a favor would have been better off 1. Taking steps to reduce their overall waste. 2. Just sending stuff to the landfill instead of recycling.