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So this might be a dumb question, but if I landfill paper instead of recycling it, does it degrade? If not, is that a poor man's form of carbon sequestration? A
by tgb 8y ago
So this might be a dumb question, but if I landfill paper instead of recycling it, does it degrade? If not, is that a poor man's form of carbon sequestration? A cursory glance suggests this is correct [1], though you'd need to know a lot more to say that it was more carbon efficient than recycling.
[1] http://www.allaboutbags.ca/degradeinlandfill.html http://www.allaboutbags.ca/degradeinlandfill.html
- cheapsteak 8y agoWas the carbon not already sequestered when it was in the form of a tree?
- tgb 8y agoI assume any serious paper production company replants the tree, so you start with a tree and end with a tree and landfilled paper.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoGiven strommen's statement about landfilled paper turning into methane, doesn't that mean paper manufacturing is basically a carbon dioxide->methane conversion operation?
- tgb 8y agoYes, the possibility I described was for if they did not biodegrade significantly. More reading makes it sound like they degrade in weeks, with a few exceptions.
- mchannon 8y agoNo, it wasn’t. Trees (esp. those suitable for paper) either burn or fall over and rot, both of which release most of the carbon they used to store. Fossil fuels used to be trees, and they were well sequestered. Paper would eventually become something similar when buried.
- strommen 8y agoYes, paper degrades in a landfill. Any carbon-based stuff you put in a landfill generally degrades to methane, which is 25-86 times worse than CO2 when it comes to global warming. So recycle your paper :)