Thanks Irishman. That’s exactly what I was looking for. My curiousity has been slaked.
BTW, to answer your question, I never have seen molten metal. I don’t work in the metal industry and have never visited a smelting plant.
I wouldn’t be running any bulldozers, either. Growing plants are fixing carbon. But burying ‘dead’ organics in a landfill should reduce CO2, since decomposition takes the fixed carbon (and oxygen) and changes it back into CO2.
What we used to call “dumps” and are now called “Sanitary Landfills” will, I believe, in the not-too-distant future be recognized as valuable collections of reusable resources. As far as my high school chemistry taught, all compounds can be broken down with the application of sufficient heat into their consituent elements. When (not “if”) thermonuclear generation of electricity becomes practicable, the electricity necessary to break down garbage into its constituent elements will be cheap enough to use for that purpose. At that time, factories will be set up near major landfills to transform the garbage found in them into elements that can be used for any suitable purpose. Then, landfills will no longer be seen as places to get rid of unused stuff, but as places to get the resources for new stuff.