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Is that a sensible phrase? The environment is everywhere.

• CheezeIt 5y ago
  Landfills aren’t everywhere.
  • nikisweeting 5y ago
    Why not not focus on building more and better landfills then? Seems like a better solution that shipping trash long distances to other countries only to have it end up in the ocean.
    • CheezeIt 5y ago
      We don’t ship our “trash”, distinguished from our recycling, to other countries.
      • nikisweeting 5y ago
        Nah, the vast majority is trash to begin with or ends up as trash. Only a fraction ends up recycled.
        • CheezeIt 5y ago
          Plastic bags don’t go in the recycling, they go in the trash bin.
          • nikisweeting 5y ago
            It's not a matter of any one thing, the vast majority of "recycling" is trash to begin with, or ends as trash without being recycled.
            • CheezeIt 5y ago
              That’s the goal. You want them to end up as trash. It’s not cost effective to recycle it, and if it were, that would lower costs and create more pollution.
• jonas21 5y ago
  Yes, as long as the plastic ends up in a proper landfill, it won't cause harm to the environment. In places with good waste management practices, like the U.S., nearly all plastic trash ends up in a landfill. As a result, the U.S. is responsible for only ~0.25% of plastic in the ocean [1]. To put this in perspective, if you got the Philippines to reduce the amount of plastic it sends to the ocean by just 1%, it would have a larger impact on ocean plastic than completely eliminating plastic in the U.S. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics
  • nikisweeting 5y ago
    To add to this, landfills have a bad reputation but are actually a pretty good solution to trash when operated well. By concentrating waste in a single place and sealing it in hermetically (with constant nearby environmental monitoring), it doesn't end up strewn everywhere. Also when it becomes economical to recycle parts it in the future, we don't have to go hunting around for it, we can just dig it up and process it in-place or nearby. https://medium.com/@robertwiblin/what-you-think-about-landfill-and-recycling-is-probably-totally-wrong-3a6cf57049ce https://medium.com/@robertwiblin/what-you-think-about-landfi...
  • Voloskaya 5y ago
    > In places with good waste management practices, like the U.S., nearly all plastic trash ends up in a landfill. This is not true, see [1]. > As a result, the U.S. is responsible for only ~0.25% of plastic in the ocean. This is also not true, and your link does not say that. The link is saying that the rivers in the USA are carrying 0.25% of the plastic that ends up in the ocean, the U.S. (as in, the people living in the US) are responsible for much, much more. Recycling plastic is a mess, so instead of dealing with it, countries like the U.S. or Canada have decided to ship it across the world to countries like the Philippines to be "recycled" over there (see [2]). So now, of course, if you look at where the plastic enters the ocean, you will see that almost all of it happens in Asian countries, that's not because they use more plastic, that's just because that's where all the plastic of the world ends up. Taking into account the origin of the platic, the U.S. is among the worst offenders: > "the United States generated the largest amount of plastic waste of any country in the world (42.0 Mt). Between 0.14 and 0.41 Mt of this waste was illegally dumped in the United States, and 0.15 to 0.99 Mt was inadequately managed in countries that imported materials collected in the United States for recycling." [1] [1]: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/44/eabd0288 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/44/eabd0288 [2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93Philippines_waste_dispute#:~:text=The%20Canada%E2%80%93Philippines%20waste%20dispute,they%20instead%20contained%20household%20waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93Philippines_was....