No engineer will guarantee a landfill liner will never leak

Evidence

We learned that the technology behind landfilling and incineration was still a beginning technology; we learned that there is no engineer that would sign the dotted line that the liner would not leak; we learned that there’s still a lot of air pollution with incineration and that you still have the landfill with incinerators. We started learning all these things through the network, just basically talking to people from the grassroots level, with common language. I guess that’s one of the things that came out of our network, was deciphering all of this technology and these terms into language that our people understand. — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 645

Categorization

• XREF: Technical-knowledge-as-silencing (ch5) is answered here by grassroots translation of landfill/incinerator science.
• CANDY: ‘No engineer will sign that the liner won’t leak’ is a striking, quotable line.
• SEED: Strong fact for the environmental-law course: the epistemic limits industrial siting guarantees.