Have you ever wondered what happens to a mattress, a car or a sofa after it has expired?

For decades, we humans simply tossed the entire object into a big hole in the ground – a landfill – and sometimes covered it over with dirt when the hole got completely full. Often, the entire dump remain uncovered, and the task of decomposition was simply left up to Mother Nature.

Sometimes we planted forests over the covered landfill and in some cases we even constructed children's playgrounds. We congratulated ourselves on the service we rendered to society.

There were a few problems with this model. Perhaps the biggest problem was that the disgarded and decomposing garbage leeched all manner and type of chemicals and compounds back into the earth. In time, many of these substances found their way into our drinking water and food chain. We were, in effect - eating our our sofas.

Mother Nature is a wonderful thing. She can bring the world back into balance given enough time, but with almost seven billion of us literally trashing the planet, we're creating a problem for her that she may need to take drastic steps to correct. Will she visit upon us a plague? A flood perhaps? Or maybe she will simply let us sit and live in our own excrement until we learn our lesson.