There’s gold in them there landfills, so let’s not rubbish them

Tourists are wrecking the Titanic. An iceberg did it first time around. Now it’s holiday-makers with enough money to pay for an underwater visit.

One couple even got married in a tiddly submarine on the bow of the ship. (Wonder if they had an army of bouncers to keep non-paying photographers away?)

The Titanic tourists disturb sediment, surround the maritime grave with crushed Coke cans tossed from the ships on the surface, and de-stabilise the structure, which is already dripping with what are picturesquely called 'rusticles'.

Being a tourist attraction is tough. "Visitor numbers are up" is good news for the local hotels and gift shops, but for the tourist attraction itself, it may signify damage from increased air pollution: the Parthenon is just one exemplar.

Air pollution comes out of the exhaust pipes of visitors' cars. But it also comes out of their personal exhaust pipes: their mouths. Many of the cave paintings at Lascaux have had to be cordoned off because of the damage done by the sheer numbers of reverential visitors breathing heavily at them.

Sooner or later, Europe is going to end up with side-by-side simulations: plastic round towers close to the real thing, allowing visitors the thrill of looking down on re-enactments of the arrival of Vikings letting on to be mad for pillage, alongside the real tower, where real people watched authentic village pillage.

The alternative is fulfilling visitors' hunger for the past by utilising a virtually indestructible tourist attraction which in Ireland is under-utilised and under-valued.

Our rubbish dumps.

We don't properly appreciate our rubbish dumps. We rubbish our landfills. Yet they represent an unequalled and fascinating record of our past. Possibly the most accurate record of all, if twenty-first century visitors want to know how the Irish once lived.

But, I hear you say, nobody in their right mind would pay to visit a rubbish dump.

Wrong.

Rubbish dumps in the form of shell middens are tourist attractions in several countries. Local histories of the peninsula where I live mention with pride the fact that it contains a pre-historic shell midden. Our ancestors not only ate an awful lot of seafood, but in the absence of wheelie bins, got very good at overarm tossing of the resultant shells into one central area, where they solidified for later visitation.

But the tourist-industry potential of rubbish dumps doesn't end with shell middens. In New Jersey, there is a Garbage Museum which attracts huge numbers of visitors. The highlight of a vacation, for many people, is looking at the refuse left by their grandparents.

The Garbage Museum is an outcropping of a relatively recent academic discipline: the archeology of garbage. Or garbology, if you want to get technical.

Garbage has always been a consideration for archaeologists. The ones who dug into Bronze Age Troy fifty years ago found evidence that the Trojans, as they ate, just ditched the animal bones on the floor. When the "offensive accumulation" rose to shin-level, they would bring in a supply of fresh clean clay and spread it out thickly over the remembrance of meals past. The only problem with this approach was that, as time went on, the level of the floor rose higher and higher. So the family had to raise the ceiling or walk in a crouch.

One of the great myths of waste is that people living in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries generate more of it than any previous generation. Archaeological evidence suggests otherwise. Take, for example, stone-age bison-hunters. When those guys got the longing for a blue bison steak, they would be sitting in their skimpy loin thongs, starving with the hunger, looking at several hundred thousand very fast foods on the hoof, with no implement to hand capable of bringing one of the animals down.

Evidence from their landfills suggests that those stone age guys thought big. They looked at a herd of, say, fifty thousand bison and thought 'Dinner!'

Then they went to one end of the valley within which the fifty thousand bison were feeding and did the pre-historic equivalent of yelling 'FIRE!' in a crowded theatre. They ran at the bison, yelling and brandishing flaming bunches of sticks. The bison took one look at this and stampeded, creating a killing traffic jam at the other end of the valley. Dead bison were piled as high as an apartment building. The hunters then took a few choice bits from a few good-looking bison corpses and abandoned the rest, leaving an amount of waste per capita that makes today's landfills look respectable by comparison.

Nor were the hunters the only wasteful people in history. One Canadian expert, after seven years examining a Maya dumping ground, where he found countless thrown-away items which were undamaged and therefore could have been re-used or re-cycled, observed that the Mayans would have thrown away a luxury car when the ashtray filled up.

The great thing about landfills is how they preserve what's in them. We tend to assume that last year's rubbish, in any landfill, has rotted away to mush. Not so, according to the Garbage Project, an investigation that's been going on for the last thirty years. Their samples, taken by special equipment from layers of garbage laid down fifty or more years ago, reveal that landfills are much better as mummifiers than they are as composters. The garbage archaeologists were able to read newspapers landfilled more than two decades earlier.

What they were not able to read, on the other hand, were copies of Playboy magazine. When their probes went into domestic garbage, although the compacted debris often contained identifiable if slimy publications, that magazine was notable by its absence from the samples. So exceptional was this absence that it led to investigation. Eventually they worked it out. Playboy was missing because the man who bought it was not going to put it into the wastepaper basket in the sitting room for his wife or mother to find.

Systematic examination of excavated garbage reveals fads and fashions in consumption right down to the increased tendency to cut the fat off meat in recent times. It shows that when there's a shortage of, say, meat, people actually waste more of it, because they panic-buy and then can't get through the stuff before it goes off. It provides reminders of long-forgotten brands. It illustrates social habits, demonstrating for example that it is poorer households which buy more expensive small sizes of heavily logo-ed goods, and richer households that purchase generics and make bulk purchases.

In addition, landfills demonstrate oddities, like the immortality of the tyre. Once a tyre has served its vehicular purpose, it's like a zombie: of no practical use, but unwilling to stay in the grave. A few tiny initiatives setting out to make items like doormats out of old tyres don't make a dent on the millions thrown away every year. And like upwardly mobile raisins in a bun, tyres always rise to the top of landfills, although nobody knows why.

We have to hope that some local authority manager somewhere will see the tourism opportunity represented by landfills and create the Disneyworld of Garbage. Right here in Ireland.