We pay other countries to take our garbage only because we prefer to imagine it is being recycled. It's not like we don't have enough landfill space here, if we were willing to treat it as the trash that it is.
Yea there was a great two part planet money series on recycling this year. And the economic take away is that the current state of recycling in the US is broken and we have more than enough landfill space for thousands of years. One idea was to just burn it which this mentioned is what some European countries are doing.
