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Plastics that sit undisturbed in the earth are a form of carbon sequestration. That is not a bad thing, as long as they are concentrated in a known place. Lan
by Baeocystin 7y ago
Plastics that sit undisturbed in the earth are a form of carbon sequestration. That is not a bad thing, as long as they are concentrated in a known place.
Landfills are lot more complex than just dumping trash in a pit. https://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/swfacilities/landfills/needfor#EnsureSafety https://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/swfacilities/landfills/needfor... may be of interest. The tl;dr is that properly-managed ones genuinely are a safe form of waste disposal.
- abathur 7y agoWell-designed landfills are probably better than loading plastic into confetti cannons, but calling anything in a man-engineered landfill "undisturbed in the earth" is a stretch. Plastics sitting in our landfills are, at human timescales, sitting relatively undisturbed on the outer skin of this world, where they are probably a teensy bit less "sequestered" than they were several thousand feet into the crust. At anything approaching geologic time, some fraction of these feats of engineering will be graciously buried by layer upon layer of new sediments; others will be sundered by the same forces that flatten mountain-ranges and carve canyons, their contents re-circulated through nature's supply chains.