Wellington Landfill

[lousingh]

Feb 4, 2019 17:02:08 GMT jamesvincent said:

You have no concept of how big landfill is. You're not going to find anything. The police spent *several million pounds* looking for a body in landfill last year and didn't find anything.

It would be far better to donate to a gofundme to use deepfake to remake missing episodes.

Two things:

To help everyone understand how big the landfill could be:

The big landfill used by Niagara Falls that includes, among other things, waste from The Manhattan Projects, is about 34 hectares, or 0.34 km**2.  It is about 100m high most of the way.  Imagine that you think there is a missing episode *there*.

I am willing to help deep fakes and reworkings from the telesnaps as best we can.  I would like anyone who makes them to ask those who saw the originals to help out with the "look and feel" of their deep fakes.

[Dan S]

I've seen what can happen to films in metal cans stored in a slightly damp garden shed. Some of the cans had gone rusty and the most badly affected ones had turned to gunge. For a film to survive in a landfill it'd have to be in a watertight container made of a substance that doesn't rust.

[martinjwills]

In storage underground there is no oxygen like in a garden shed, so things tend to last a lot longer, film has been recovered from many years in landfill and was restored.

[rmackenziefehr]

In addition to the points already raised, it is probably useful to look at the most notable example of a find like this, the Dawson City discovery of silent films in the 1970s.

In that case:

1) The films were placed in a structure (I've seen it described as both a pool and a former hockey rink) which ultimately served as something of a vault;

2) There wasn't a pile of other rubbish placed onto it;

3) It was in a compact area, unlike most landfills;

4) The permafrost climate of the Yukon was more conducive to materials being preserved than most climates in which landfills are located;

5) The films actually were in their cans, which wasn't always the case with films that were dumped;

6) In spite of this all, a lot of the films found had issues with water damage.

When this is how a best-case scenario turns out, it demonstrates why randomly searching landfills for films is an exercise in futility.

[Sue Butcher]

There'd have to be a good reason for digging an old dump up, and mid-20th Century landfill isn't of much interest to archaeologists yet. Do we know how many reels of NZ and UK television ended up there?