6 ms·
This is a source of anxiety for me lately. We use plastic everywhere and yet seem to not know what to do with it. Plastic is cheap they say, but would plastic b
by pythux 7y ago
This is a source of anxiety for me lately. We use plastic everywhere and yet seem to not know what to do with it. Plastic is cheap they say, but would plastic be so cheap if we had to factor in the price of recycling it or at least handling its after life? Would it be realistic to ask to think about what to do with wastes of the products sold?
- dgzl 7y agoFull lifecycle cost... That would make an interesting website.
- smu 7y agoThis book (although a bit older already) attempts to give an overview of the impact of a lot of stuff: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Bad-are-Bananas-Everything/dp/1846688914/ref=nodl_ https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Bad-are-Bananas-Everything/dp/1...
- lacker 7y agoThe cost of landfill is really low, so it wouldn’t make any difference if it were added to the cost of plastic. The world has a lot of important environmental problems, like climate change. Landfill space is not an important environmental problem. You should spend your worrying energy on something else.
- noisem4ker 7y agoI can't help but think that filling the earth with trash is not the correct solution to the problem, however convenient it may be.
- ethbro 7y agoIs it the correct solution, if it allows us to spend effort and money migrating our energy mix away from fossil fuels? Is it the correct solution, if we have already shifted our economies to carbon-neutral or -negative modes? These are very different situations, and we only have time and money to focus on so many things at once.
- Retric 7y agoLandfills replacement a tiny volume and can be mined long term. It’s mostly organic matter that’s going to turn into coal and oil eventually but there plenty of more useful elements like copper in the mix.
- ZeroGravitas 7y agoI'm continually amazed at how popular the concept of mining landfills for resources is in this forum, while at the same time recycling is regularly dismissed as wishful thinking. Perhaps it just needs rebranded as pre-emptive landfill mining?
- maxerickson 7y agoIt's super duper shitty ore, basically useless.
- Aperocky 7y agoOn a literal sense no less
- sjwright 7y agoUntil someone creates a machine that can pulverise anything into a fine powder and progressively sort each granule into their constituent metal, plastic, silica and organic type.
- maxerickson 7y agoYou use that machine on better ore.
- tclancy 7y agoOr recyclables.
- 7y ago
- mrfusion 7y agoRemember all that same stuff was taken out of the earth at one point.
- barunio 7y agoActually, no. You might say this about metals, for example, but nature does not produce the sort of high-energy low-information hydrocarbon chains that comprise nearly all plastics. Inserting massive quantities of manmade endocrine disruptors into the earth is massively disruptive.
- thirstywhimbrel 7y agoLandfills are tiny relative to usable land and are eventually just capped and turned into parks. Most of the popular fear about running out of landfill space can be traced back to a misused statistic about small rural landfills being decommissioned. RCRA Subtitle D regs basically have driven the shutdown of old town dumps. Modern landfills are much more efficient, with better safety controls for leaching and gas capture, better compression and sorting, and even processes that speed decomposition. The headlines will scream that the number of available landfills are dropping rapidly and neglect to mention that total capacity is actually up and total disposed volume has been trending down since 2000, even despite population increases. Highly recommend touring a landfill and learning about waste management at scale. There are really interesting engineering dilemmas that are always a step more nuanced than "we must use x solution or fill the world with trash."
- randycupertino 7y agoDon't landfills leech lots of pollutants into the groundwater and nearby environment?
- thirstywhimbrel 7y agoEfficient leachate control is an interesting area, but there are various families of techniques to do it and methods for monitoring effectiveness that have emerged from the last several decades of focused study. Current facilities are way better equipped than the old solution of uncontrolled municipal dumps.
- xkcd-sucks 7y agoStill, leachate control is nothing but a cost center to the people running a landfill. It's likely that plenty of landfills are not as compliant as they report, through intention or ignorance; and when the landfill operator goes bankrupt nobody takes over the maintenance. In a sense, leachate control is the low-tar cigarette of waste disposal
- 7y ago
- UweSchmidt 7y agoI'd guess many environmental issues are connected. Rethinking how we produce and consume should lead to solutions that both reduce waste and save energy. Having to deal with the trash ourselves for a bit might put some incentive to consider waste while designing products and supply chains.
- ZeroGravitas 7y agoA meta study of papers doing lifecycle cost analysis of the options shows that on several metrics, including climate change reduction, landfill is worse than both incineration and recycling for a broad range of materials. This is why almost every functional government in the world legislates accordingly. This is partly due to the energy cost of new vs recycled so somewhat ironically landfill becomes a slightly better option as the grid becomes more renewable, though unlikely to pull ahead of recycling, since it also takes energy that would be getting cleaner.
- techslave 7y agocan you cite this meta study please? i very, very much doubt that said study existed at the time these decisions were made. also the energy cost is a wash (or loss) for almost all but aluminum. glass would be fine but we are awash in glass, so AIUI cardboard and aluminum are the only consumer items worth recycling when consider energy and other input costs. i’ve no idea on total climate impact (eg greenhouse gas production) though and i don’t doubt you. i only doubt your assertion that governments made these decisions with that in mind.
- ZeroGravitas 7y agohttps://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.4965581 https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.4965581 and https://www.wrap.org.uk/content/environmental-benefits-recycling https://www.wrap.org.uk/content/environmental-benefits-recyc... A summary from the latter talking specifically about plastic (though the document covers other materials): The results confirm that mechanical recycling is the best waste management option in respect of the climate change potential, depletion of natural resources and energy demand impacts. The analysis highlights again that these benefits of recycling are mainly achieved by avoiding production of virgin plastics. The environmental benefits are maximised by collection of good quality material (to limit the rejected fraction) and by replacement of virgin plastics on a high ratio (1 to 1). Incineration with energy recovery performs poorly with respect to climate change impact Landfill is confirmed as having the worst environmental impacts in the majority of cases. As the UK moves to a lower-carbon energy mix, recycling will become increasingly favoured.
- dig1 7y agoI'm not sure are you serious about not seeing landfill connection with environmental problems or just being sarcastic. If landfills are not such a problem, why "developed" countries (I won't name them but we know who they are) are exporting junk to China, India and Africa? Why simply not set landfills near popular cities so we can all enjoy the beauty of "low environmental issue" problems ;) These days there is more trust in corrupted media than plain logic.
- maxerickson 7y agoFor a long time it was because China was buying it. Here the landfill has recycling sorting on site and puts glass in the landfill because no one will pay what it costs to ship it.
- ars 7y agoYour information is incorrect. No countries are exporting junk, rather some countries buy recycling in order to profitably use it. And those developed countries were willing to sell it. And yes those developed countries do in fact have landfills and they use them. there are no countries that export pure trash to be landfilled in a third world country.
- Scoundreller 7y ago> there are no countries that export pure trash to be landfilled in a third world country. Of course they do. Even Toronto was exporting 100 truckloads of trash to Michigan for years until recently. https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2018/02/19/canadian-garbage-michigan-landfills-solid-waste/337837002/ https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2018/02/19/c...
- ars 7y agoMichigan might be cold but it's not a 3rd world country. Michigan, perhaps you might have noticed, borders Canada. No one is shipping trash long distance.
- Solar19 7y ago
- electricslpnsld 7y ago> The cost of landfill is really low, so it wouldn’t make any difference if it were added to the cost of plastic. The cost isn’t just disposal, it’s also production. Plastic production (‘ethylene cracking’ specifically) is really environmentally gnarly. Communities across the US and internationally will be way better off once we move away from disposable consumer plastics.
- Scoundreller 7y agoPlastics takes fossil fuels and sequesters them for a while so we can't/don't release their carbon. If we made less plastic, would the decrease in gas/oil consumption just be increased in other processes?
- jdnenej 7y agoOil supply is effectively infinite. By that I mean there is so much available that we will have destroyed the planet before we remove it all. We extract as much as there is a demand for. If you lower the demand then you lower the amount being extracted
- electricslpnsld 7y agoShell’s new US-based plant [1] is expected to pump half a million cars worth of CO2 exhaust into the air a year. I haven’t seen any data suggesting that plastics production reduces the net amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/business/energy-environment/plastics-shell-pennsylvania-plant.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/business/energy-environme...
- barunio 7y agoYou are massively underestimating the environmental impacts. Every form of plastic in widespread use has been found to be a significant endocrine disruptor. The rate of plastic waste has followed an exponential curve similar to emissions. Plastics are likely on the same order of magnitude as climate change and deforestation in terms of the long-term impact on species extinction (and to human health, if that is of greater concern).
- mschuster91 7y ago> Landfill space is not an important environmental problem. You should spend your worrying energy on something else. Let me guess you're American, where free space is plenty? In most of Europe, space is constrained and about half the EU has banned ordinary landfills for that reason. Also, landfills are an inherent danger to their surroundings in case the bottom barrier breaks and fluids seep into groundwater or that more-or-less uncontrollable fires break out.
- beowulfey 7y agoA lot of toxic chemicals leach from landfills because there is hardly any proper training on what should be disposed that way for the public
- RyJones 7y agohttps://youtu.be/5QRw6TbeOxA https://youtu.be/5QRw6TbeOxA Raise prices Push expenses downstream
- dehrmann 7y agoSweden just burns it cleanly. I don't have any anxiety over the single-use plastic I use, just frustration that we worry too much about what to do with it. Now the Pacific trash island is another story... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/climate/sweden-garbage-used-for-fuel.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/climate/sweden-garbage-us... That said, I keep hoping thermal depolymerization takes off.