They were just huge piles of stinking garbage. Now, everything is orderly, with different sections for different materials. And the heavy equipment is running constantly to bury the garbage.
The landfill is huge. I go to the compost section where I can just pull the heavy waterlogged cans out of the hatch, without having to lift them into a dumpster. The compost area is a good two miles from where you check in. It's wayyyy back in the woods. I saw a bear back there once.
In the 90s, I was working at a large facility in the finance department. One of the women accidently threw away some really important paper files. Our director was looking for volunteers to go to the landfill to look for files. This was a different landfill then the one I went to today. This one was about 35 miles from my home.
I volunteered, and another guy went with me. We had to do a lot of detective work at the landfill office (ie: where would the truck from this plant have unloaded, etc.).
We ended up in a freaking MASSIVE pile of garbage...probably a couple of acres.
We waded through all of that shit, among the rats and the large birds feeding on the garbage. We were looking for anything that looked like it might be from our office.
We finally found the files. We brought them back to work, and we were nice and stinky. 
They sent us home for the day, and the next day, we got a $100 each monetary award for finding the files.
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