The US is huge and most of it is sparsely populated. There is no shortage of space. People from actual, tiny, crowded countries must find you guys hilarious.
There's no shortage of space very far from where people live, sure. Do you really think that shipping vast amounts of trash across the country can be done that cheaply?
Building new landfills in the eastern states will necessarily mean building them in someone's backyard. There's no place in the eastern states that is truly unpopulated.
Even New York is mostly empty. Have you ever been out of the city? I think the problem is you're assuming that the population must be zero. But it's quite possible to purchase a large tract of rural land with little agricultural value, nobody living nearby, and good ground water conditions and build a landfill there.
I think you're completely overestimating how much land is available in eastern states with "nobody living nearby". I've never seen any such land, at all. There's always someone living there. Go look up the population of any county in any east-coast state; it's not zero. You're also completely overestimating the amount of rural land with "little agricultural value" in the eastern states; any such land is usually a wetland, and protected for good reason.
The only places I've ever seen with "nobody living nearby" were in western states: Utah, Arizona, etc. It's not economical to ship trash from NY to AZ.
There's plenty of places where a landfill is only going to bother 20 households, and it would be easy to give them a million dollars to compensate if that was necessary.
