Building A Mountain of Trash

Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley tour the largest active landfill in the United States, the Puenta Hills landfill, near the city of Whittier, California:

Hewitt, otherwise an extremely low-key and calm presence, became quite agitated as we tried to maneuver between dump trucks, compacting machines, and piles of shredded green waste. "This is not good!" was his repeated refrain, as heavy equipment backed up toward us without warning.
His alarm was justified: in Garbology, Hume notes that eight landfill workers nationwide died in 2010, and that the risk of "drop-off"--the chance that some of the twenty to thirty feet of uncompacted trash that builds up each day could start to slide, tipping them off the edge of the mountain altogether--is omnipresent.
On a normal day, Hewitt told us, the active dumping site at the top of Puente Hills is usually about an acre in area, and twenty feet deep. It's called a cell--not, as Edward Hume writes, "in the prison-block sense, but more akin to the tiny biological unit, many thousands of which are needed to create a single, whole organism." In other words, the garbage pile that the bulldozers and graders push, compact, and sculpt each day, is a landfill building block--a brick in the pyramid of trash that is Puente Hills.
The resulting "fill plan," designed by the Sanitation Districts's waste engineers and staked out afresh each day, informs the particular topography that the heavy machinery massaging the trash are trying to achieve. Down to its cell slopes and road patterns, the landfill is an entirely managed and manufactured terrain, a shape calculated in advance and then sculpted, incrementally, with every shift of every machine.
Hewitt's description of a mountain-building logic formed of "cells" could not help but remind us of historians Martin Bressani and Robert Jan van Pelt's discussion of 19th-century architect Eugène Viollet le Duc--designer of, among other things, the plinth or artificial hill upon which the Statue of Liberty now stands.

A friend's dad was a bulldozer operator at a landfill, and was considered one of the foremost experts at handling landfill fires.  The landfill is now as tall as a 40 story building, and since I was recently told that the Eiffel Tower weighs as much as 2000 female African elephants, I will mention that the landfill stores the equivalent weight in trash of 15 million dead elephants.