That depends on what you do with the trash. If you burn it for heat and electricity, this is actually an excellent use for it. As long as your region has oil-

That depends on what you do with the trash. If you burn it for heat and electricity, this is actually an excellent use for it. As long as your region has oil- or coal-powered plants, burning plastic waste means that you got more use out of the oil than if you had burned it directly. You are absolutely correct in that recycling is an unquestioned good, everyone "knows" you should recycle, but noone thinks about what it means and what actually happens with the stuff that gets recycled, or how it is recycled, or if it makes economic or environmental sense to recycle a material. In Sweden, which doesn't really have landfills, and where recycling is also elevated to some kind of saintly status, there was an article published by some environmental agency a couple of decades ago which challenged this. They basically got labeled heretics, but the points they made were actually good: 1) Aluminium should absolutely be recycled, the energy costs of converting bauxite into aluminium are astronomical, compared to recycling used aluminium containers. 2) Glass should be recycled for the same reasons, it's cheaper and easier to do than to make new ones. 3) Newspaper, cardboard, and similar low-plastic paper products should be recycled, you can easily make new newspaper or cardboard out of it, saves you some trees. 4) The rest - fuck it - burn it all. Recycling plastic is hard, you can't turn it into high-value plastic products such as clear plastic packaging, you can only make low-value plastic products, and then you might as well burn it, and offset your oil-powered plants.