Standing¹ in a huge hole in the ground which is slowly being filled with thousands of tonnes of stinking² rubbish it's easy to see why landfill gets a bad press.

站在地上一个巨大的坑洞旁边看到成千上万吨发出恶臭的垃圾被填进去，大家就会理解为什么垃圾堆臭名远扬了。

More than half the waste in the UK is sent to landfill

The site in Bury is one of dozens across the country - it is a giant sand quarry³（采砂场） with a void（空的） in the middle which feels the size of a football stadium.

And all day, every day that void is being filled by a fleet of heavy lorries which dump rubbish into the path of a bulldozer（推土机） which compacts it down to make way for the next load - 600,000 tonnes a year.

Landfill has never been pretty. But it has for decades been an effective way of dealing⁴ with waste. It is true that we are - as a nation - getting better. But the UK still dumps over half of its waste into landfill, compared with EU neighbours like Germany where the figure is about 1%.

The Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn, says it is time for a radical⁵ rethink: "We can't keep producing large amounts of rubbish and putting it in holes in the ground... it's producing greenhouse gases which are contributing to a problem we have to solve, we are throwing away things that have a value.

"We've been living in a 50-year bubble in which we thought we could throw away things without regard to the consequences. It's got to change."

There are already tough European rules - and fines - designed to dramatically cut the use of landfill. But now the government is calling together local authorities to tell them they must do more.

'Zero waste'

At a "waste summit" in London, Mr Benn will tell council leaders they' have done well to increase recycling from 8% to 37% in the past 12 years, but that another "big step" is needed.

Latest government figures say we in UK send more than half our waste to landfill. That is a huge 62 million tonnes a year in England alone. Now the aim is to reduce landfill by at least 50% over the next 10 years.

If the UK is going to achieve its new "mission statement" of becoming a "zero waste nation" it will need to see more investment on the scale adopted by the Greater Manchester Waste Disposal Agency.

It is ploughing an estimated £4.5bn into waste management over the next 25 years. The money is being used to build and run huge a variety of projects including composters for garden and food waste, anaerobic⁶ digesters（厌氧消解器） to create energy from rubbish and huge recycling schemes.

The director of contract services, David Taylor, says it represents good value for money.

"We want to divert waste away from landfill and get as much value as we can from the waste we receive. That's being achieved through composting, recycling and through treatment of the residual⁷ waste（废物残渣）," he says.

"We have a simple choice: we can do nothing but that will cost people considerably⁸ more that what it has cost to develop all these facilities."