It is the largest landfill by size with an area of about 80 hectares (of which 72 hectares rest on the flood plain adjoining the Epe-Lekki Lagoon and 8 hectares is forested land).
In the Philippines for example, the Asian Development Bank and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources jointly project that if current trends continue, the country will need 200 new landfills the size of a current Manila landfill by the year 2020.
On their Facebook page, the SMASS said the necropsy was taking place at the landfill site because the size of the whale meant their only option was to remove the carcass as landfill.
"When I went to the tip the manager took me up to the current landfill site and when I saw it - it's about the size of a football field - my first thought was 'no chance'," he said.
Only noncontainerized solid, nonflowing waste material can be stored in a new waste pile, and the material must be landfilled when the size of the pile becomes unmanageable.
Based on the laboratory test results, a numerical model was constructed to simulate a typically sized landfill liner consisting of shale-clay mixtures.
According to this rule, future landfills, with the size larger than 2.5 MMT and volume greater than 2.5 million m3, will have to install features that would either collect or flare the landfill gas.
At its current size, the landfill has the capacity to continue running for eight more years.
If we kept food scraps out of landfills, not only would we reduce the size of our landfills, but we'd also produce less methane and toxic sludge.
The calculations also assume that the MSW in a place like Lagos goes to a single appropriately sized large landfill.
