IN THE movie WALL·E, humankind has left Earth in a bit of a mess. The planet is choked with garbage and all the people have shipped out, leaving robot WALL·E to clean the place up and make it habitable again. Things may not be quite that bad yet, but there’s no doubt that we produce a huge amount of waste. Even with increased recycling, landfill sites are filling up by the day and -in the absence of a plucky robot – the waste experts of planet Earth are working on the next best thing: landfill mining.

The idea is simple. Instead of disappearing under mountains of our own waste, while paying through the nose for diminishing commodities, why not dig up and recycle what we have already thrown away?

Next week, industry experts will gather in London for the first global landfill mining conference. Bringing together environmental scientists, economists and landfill operators, the one-day meeting promises to show delegates how to turn waste into “garbage gold”.

Landfill mining has been tried before. The first scheme began in 1953 at Hiriya garbage dump outside Tel Aviv, Israel, and aimed to reclaim fine-particle waste rich in minerals to improve soil quality at local citrus fruit farms. The landfill closed in 1998, but the recycling plant that remains on the site still produces soil improver from green waste. Then during the 1960s and 1970s, a handful of sites in the US began separating waste to recycle the steel and to compost food scraps. In the late 1980s, a pilot programme was set up to extract recyclables from a small, community landfill …