"Honey, I'll be down in the plastic mines today"

It's really just recycling on a new timeframe.

British experts predict that there will come a time, somewhere around 2020, when we'll return to our stinking, festering landfills to mine for plastic. As resources become in shorter supply and the price of oil continues to climb, all our decades of flagrant waste will provide new sources of "raw" materials.

As Peter Mills, director of New Earth Solutions, was quoted as saying, the really great thing about plastic is that it never biodegrades: "Once plastic is in a landfill site, it pretty much sits there doing nothing -- and the beauty of that is that you're able to go back and recapture it in the future."

It had to be just a matter of time before someone figured out that a vast quantity of the earth's resources are back underground, where we put them after a mere one use. It's hopeful, actually. All that time we thought we were throwing things away; as it turns out, there is no "away" (as some have perpetually warned) and that's actually a very good thing. It means we might have a shot at recapturing some of what we lost in past mistakes.

The era of waste is far from over; in fact the folks studying the potential for landfill mining think it will become profitable within another ten years or so only because we'll continue our lifestyles of buy and discard, and with 9 billion people and millions more cars, we won't be able to keep it up without dipping into our old trash.