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One other benefit to recycling other than reducing new material usage is keeping stuff out of landfills. Landfills are anaerobic, which means most bacteria that
by coldpie 11y ago
One other benefit to recycling other than reducing new material usage is keeping stuff out of landfills. Landfills are anaerobic, which means most bacteria that breaks stuff down can't live in them, so things break down extremely slowly[1]. That slow breakdown means we need more space for landfills, which are toxic environments. So even if the recycling process is neutral, or even somewhat more costly than producing new material, keeping stuff out of landfills is another benefit that you might not have considered in your calculation.
In addition, cities with recycling programs can actually sell the material they gather back to companies, literally turning garbage into money and creating a revenue source for the city[2,3]. One important component in this is that the cities can get a higher price for higher quality recycling streams, where the output is all composed of one type of material. This is why, even though St Paul is now single-sort, I still separate my paper from the other recycling. It helps keep the paper higher quality by avoiding getting it dirty and wet, and costs me no real effort.
[1] http://environment.about.com/od/recycling/a/biodegradable.htm http://environment.about.com/od/recycling/a/biodegradable.ht...
[2] http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/recycling-in-the-us-an-off-again-on-again-love-affair/ http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/recycling-in-the-us-a...
[3] http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2015/12/recycling-matching-high-tech-materials-science-with-economics-that-work/ http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2015/12/recycling-matching-...
- henrikschroder 11y agoI'm from a place where less than one percent of all household waste ends up in a landfill, so moving to the US and learning that most of my trash actually just goes on a dump somewhere was quite a shock to me. So why doesn't the US have more trash incinerators? It seems like such a no-brainer to me if you care about the environment?
- coldpie 11y agoIs burning trash better* than a landfill? Honestly asking, I don't know and this is something I'd love to be better educated about. Seems like you'd have lots of toxic fumes from burning, which may make it less of a no-brainer. * I don't know how to define "better".
- mseebach 11y agoYou can burn it cleanly, at sufficiently high temperatures. In the nordic countries, this heat is then going into city-wide central heating networks, meaning it substitutes natural gas or electricity for domestic heating.
- Kluny 11y agoThere's still going to be emissions though, right? What are the emissions? Just steam and CO2?
- AjithAntony 11y ago> sufficiently high temperatures Can you fuel such a fire with only the trash? Or do we need to supplement with other fossil fuels?
- delazeur 11y agoA combination of high temperature, gas residence time, and various scrubbing technologies can more or less solve the toxic emissions problem from incinerators. On the other hand, landfills will emit huge amounts of methane for decades, and at this point relatively few landfills are equipped to collect this gas. From a strictly air quality-focused perspective (my professional area), I would say incinerators are usually better. I would guess that incinerators are also preferable from a soil and water quality perspective, but I can't say for sure.
- rsync 11y ago"Is burning trash better* than a landfill? Honestly asking" I don't know a lot about this, but I do know that the nordic countries all incinerate their trash, and do so with scrubbers/filters that negate the pollution coming out of the incinerator. Word on the street is that the nordic countries do everything better than we do and are the bright shining example for all things urban progressivism ... so ... I guess it's the right thing to be doing :)
- jks 11y agoIt cannot be implemented everywhere. Sweden now needs to import trash to power its district heating, see e.g. http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/3/27/sweden-wants-your-garbage-for-energy.html http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/3/27/sweden-wants...
- jonknee 11y agoWe have a lot of empty space and until very recently it was way worse for the environment to burn than bury.
- raisedbyninjas 11y agoPlasma gasification incinerators are quite clean.
- jonknee 11y agoYes and it's quite new, huge amounts of waste have been (and continue to be) burned in much more dirty methods.
- whitegrape 11y agoThe US (and the world in general, really) has a lot of open land. We're in no danger of reaching "peak landfill" anytime soon, and if/when we do, it will probably be feasible and cheaper to lift and launch waste into the sun instead of trying to recycle it.
- triangleman 11y agoRegarding that last bit: http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/shooting_for_the_sun/ http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/shooting_for_the_sun/
- whitegrape 11y agoNice one, hadn't seen that particular article about the problem before. A hidden underlying detail in my comment is an assumption that such a waste crisis is so far in the future that we'll have things like space elevators (making getting to orbit easy) and solar sails (making reducing the starting earth-to-sun relative velocity doable in less than a year), though.