Modern humans create a lot of waste that hangs around for a very long time. The world's oceans have massive amounts of discarded plastic pollution floating and washing up on coastlines, however most plastics sink, so a worse problem is sitting on the ocean floors out of sight. Then there are micro plastics that can't be seen that are throughout the oceans and building up in food chains.
Landfill has similar issues. We are burying millions of tons of plastics and other toxic waste.
Most rubbish on land is placed in 'land fill' which is placing rubbish in a big hole, covering it with dirt and waiting for future generations to deal with the problem.
Small volumes of some waste such as glass, metals, paper/cardboard, aluminium/aluminum, plastics, compostable waste etc are recycled at great expense. The big problem is separating waste. If there is an old washing machine it is likely to have many, many parts and be very expensive to fully recycle. Some parts will be bonded to other parts that need to be recycled differently etc. To fully recycle everything would be prohibitively expensive.
My understanding is that most waste in these countries is fed into high temperature incinerators and most rubbish burns to form carbon dioxide that goes out the chimney. The high temperatures break down the nasty chemicals into carbon dioxide with filters to take out the rest. Happily these incinerators also produce electricity and hot water that are both sold. The residue can be mined with its high concentration of metals, minerals etc.
Please note that low temperature incineration leaves toxins in the air coming out of the chimney.
Japan and Sweden have been doing high temperature incineration of waste for over 50 years with great success. They have a mere 5% of the landfill per head of other comparable countries.
Whenever high temperature incineration is mentioned the waste and recycling industries, governments and environmentalists say that would be bad because of more carbon dioxide in the air. The carbon dioxide would be minimal compared with the current world emissions and there is much, much less land fill and less toxins in the soil. This seems like a good trade off to me. Plus, we know it is proven for over 50 years in Japan and Sweden.
I believe that the people who operate the landfill and recycling businesses don't want anything to change and ensure that it doesn't.
Land fill is a relatively simple business:
buy an old quarry or other big hole in the ground, generally very cheaply
get government approval for it to be used as a land fill dump and with this approval the value of the hole goes through the roof
charge people a lot of money for the right to throw their waste into your hole
get government to set up barriers so other people are prohibited from getting approval for their holes to be used for land fill. (this ensures that prices stay high and that all of the business is kept by you and maybe your cartel mates)
Current recycling is also a simple business
get government to mandate that certain items have to be recycled
tap into any aspect(s) of this recycling chain that is profitable
tap into any government money available for Recycling
extra money can be made by placing 'contaminated' or 'excess' recyclables in land fill
The waste/recycling industry has been very successful in getting the governments, environmentalists and the public to focus on recycling as a 'solution' when recycling will only ever be viable for a tiny proportion of the waste stream.
Instead of people dumping waste it can be a valuable fuel for heating water and electricity generation.