Imagine the garbage normally landfilled vaporized in that concentrated solar energy and the constituent products separated and condensed for recycling. Bio fuels, metals, all kinds of useful products. Then electricity and heat produced from the waste heat in the condensor, with distilled water as a further by product of the power generation.
Forget the magnifying glass though and use a compound parabolic reflector to concentrate the input from the mirror field.
Solar powered landfill and trash mining with energy as a by product. But you don't need six square miles. One mile would be plenty. Instead of landfills taking up more and more square miles, permanent energy facililities that recycle everything.
Oh and gardens under the tracking mirror fields where a micro climate that would be cooler than the surrounding desert would be created, but containing enough incidental solar light to still grow plants.
Much nicer than ever growing landfills, dried up rivers for water for southwestern cities, and fossil fuel plants to feed electricity to homes.
The garbage processing could be combined with manufacturing. Since the metals would be vaporized they could be brought to a liquid state and molded, or precipitated as powdered metal for compression molding processes used in many manufacturing techniques, such as common forged metal parts like hand tools.
