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You also have to think in terms of actual harm. Considering the US has an absurd amount of junk land it can use for landfills, a single use plastic object that
by Causality1 5y ago
You also have to think in terms of actual harm. Considering the US has an absurd amount of junk land it can use for landfills, a single use plastic object that has 1/1000 the carbon emissions of the reusable alternative may be the best environmental choice.
- edoceo 5y agoWhere is the "junk land"? Almost everywhere has animals that likely don't enjoy plastic.
- l33t2328 5y agoHow important are those animals?
- smarx007 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem
- tehlike 5y agoLandfill? Somewhere buried?
- Causality1 5y agoYou could restrict yourself to dry lake beds that don't flood in winter, which are nearly as lifeless as Mars, and still have enough landfill area for centuries of waste. The average American produces 3.5 pounds of trash per day at an average one third of a gram per cubic centimeter. Assuming that holds steady, and we use a normal landfill depth of 400 feet, and the US population doubles over the next century, we need a landfill area of 250 square miles to cover us for the next hundred years. Compared to available land that's tiny.
- edoceo 5y agoUsing standard units: - 1589g of trash per day! - 4767 cm3 to store it (3cm3/gram) - 130 m3 per lifetime (75yr) - 300,000,000 lifetimes. - 78 km3 storage allocated - 39 km3 required ~~We're gonna need a bigger boat.~~ Neat!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- yesenadam 5y ago> - 39,000,000,000 km3 required I think something went very wrong there! 4767 x 75 x 365 = I get 130,500,000 cm³/person/lifetime. You got 130,000,000,000,000,000. There are 10¹⁵ cubic centimetres in a cubic kilometre, not 10⁶. I think all your numbers are for m³, not km³, a factor of a billion out, so your final figure should be 39 km³.
- edoceo 5y agoThanks, I've edited (working from mobile, some copy paste issues with long numbers). I think it's right now? (How do you get the <sup>3</sup>?)
- loa_in_ 5y agoshould be 39km2 not km3
- abakker 5y agoNevada. Just fill in old mines?
- edoceo 5y agoBringing jobs back to Goldfield and Tonopah! And we needs more hands down Yellowjacket Mine
- dr_dshiv 5y agoOmg, travel the USA more. So. Much. Land.
- throwaway894345 5y ago“Do animals prefer plastic or no plastic” is a false choice. The real choice is “do animals prefer plastic or rapid global warming”.
- kortilla 5y agoMuch of Nevada is a lifeless desert. There is a reason it was chosen for nuclear bomb testing.
- edoceo 5y agoIt's not lifeless. You can look it up but it's more fun to go out and see it for yourself. The desert out there is quite beautiful and there are loads of critters.
- madaxe_again 5y agoYes, but those critters are a long way away and so they don’t really exist.
- kortilla 5y agoI lived there. There is very little life in the Nevada salt flats.
- madaxe_again 5y agoAnywhere outside of a city centre, according to many. I live in a rural area. People drive out here from the city to dump their old appliances in the forests of this “junk land”. Almost every road corner has a pile of refrigerators and washing machines next to it. My current refrigerator was rescued from one of these impromptu landfills. Nothing at all wrong with it, just five years old, so it’s trash. Just because you can’t see it, just because it doesn’t have value to property developers, does not make it junk. I mean, by this logic, we should just dump our trash in the “junk water” which covers much of the planet.
- madaxe_again 5y agoOk. I guess if you’re all of the view this is wrong, would you mind if I came and dumped stuff in your city apartment? It looks like junk to me.
- Causality1 5y agoI don't know why you decided someone saying the US has plenty of junk land must be talking about your home. I was referring to dry salt flats, abandoned strip mines, and the like. The vast amounts of space under major cities would also make good landfill volume.
- madaxe_again 5y agoBecause the entire idea that land can be junk leads to a rapid broadening of the definition of junk. Your NIMBY attitude of “out of sight, out of mind” is exactly how we ended up in this mess in the first place.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 5y agoDoes the US still operate landfills? Some or all EU countries have completely abandoned the practice. So that's just not a harm that matters, unlike some other ones. In any case, it'd be compounding the problem here, and rather bad economics at the same time. Plastics aren't that hard to collect/separate, especially if it's ok to be mixed with paper. They burn readily and, given high temperatures, cleanly, allowing the recuperation of a significant fraction of its energy content. Then, there's recycling, of course. Not always possible, but not entirely impossible, either.
- Retric 5y agoYes, the US still has landfills as does Europe. “In 2018, 24% of all municipal waste generated in the EU was landfilled.” That said, incineration is a similar option that drastically lowers volume of waste, but still produced ash that ends up buried and vast amounts of CO2.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 5y agoYeah, the news I remembered were about Germany, specifically. it, and a few others, are at <=1% landfill: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/20180328STO00751/eu-waste-management-infographic-with-facts-and-figures https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/201...
- Retric 5y agoThat’s extremely misleading Germany simply uses incinerators before dumping the ash in landfills. “One nation now grappling with the legacy of its long embrace of incineration is Denmark. The country, one of Europe’s biggest waste producers, built so many incinerators that by 2018 it was importing a million tons of trash.” https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-europe-a-backlash-is-growing-over-incinerating-garbage https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-europe-a-backlash-is-growi...
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- CameronNemo 5y agoThe only sustainable way to dispose of plastic is incineration. Otherwise you poison the land and water that flows through the land.
- NortySpock 5y agoIs turning plastic into CO2 in an incinerator really the best solution for the planet this century? I'm down for recycling or burial in landfills, but CO2 seems like something we need to minimize this century.
- dzhiurgis 5y agoIf it’s 1000 times less than paper/wood then hell yeah
- eastendguy 5y ago> a single use plastic object that has 1/1000 the carbon emissions of the reusable alternative may be the best environmental choice. Is there any data that single use stuff (of any kind) creates less carbon emissions? I would expect it to be the other way around, except for some edge cases.
- Causality1 5y agoYes, mostly because of the energy used in their creation. For example you have to reuse a cotton grocery bag 7100 times before you break even with plastic bags for carbon footprint. https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-73-4.pdf https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-... You're probably not going to do that.
- Shacklz 5y agoAren't the plastic bags mainly a problem because they tend to end up in places where they don't belong at all, like oceans etc.? They can't really decompose or anything like that, they just shred to tiny little pieces that mess with animals (and ultimately also our) digestion, no?
- jounker 5y agoYup. There are places where plastic bags accumulate. Once it was my doorstep. Every morning there were piles of plastic bags that were delivered to my house. Just take a trip along any river or stream near a town and you’ll find them swimming by like lifeless jellyfish
- muskox2 5y agoAnd microplastics don't just mess with digestion, they're also theorized to be part of the reason fertility is dropping in humans over time.
- patall 5y agoYou have not read the document that you link. Else, you would have noticed that it states that a not-organic cotton bag has to be reused 52 times for the same relative impact on climate change. The 7100 is impact on ozone depletion: p. 18: 'Conversely, for composite and cotton the very high number of reuse times is given by the ozone depletion impact alone. Without considering ozone depletion, the number of reuse times ranges from 50 to 1400 for conventional cotton, from 150 to 3800 for organic cotton, and from 0 to 740 for the composite material bag. The highest number is due to the use of water resource, but also to freshwater and terrestrial eutrophication'. And as I have commented elsewhere: I have cotton bags that I have easily used 500 times. If I had used an old T-shirt for the bag or later use the old bag for cleaning purposes, the 7,100 becomes very relative.
- dclowd9901 5y agoSorry, but given the “half life” of a single use plastic item with respect to its usability, isn’t it’s environment cost essentially infinite?
- alkonaut 5y agoI'm surprised every time I hear the concept of "land fill" in conjunction with trash. As if the natural thing to do with waste is... put it in a hole in the ground? It feels like some 50's conception of environment policy to me. Shouldn't things be either recycled as much as possible, and the rest incinerated for energy?
- bserge 5y agoSurprisingly, no - just dumping shit in a big hole is the most environmentally friendly thing to do - least energy used, least pollution created. The problem is having the space in some place where neither flora nor fauna will be affected.
- alkonaut 5y agoThat’s the problem though isn’t it. Assuming trash will never be without electronics, batteries etc, it will end up in water. As far as I understand, burning in decent facilities should keep most nasty stuff out of the atmosphere and ground water (e.g heavy metals)
- nate_meurer 5y agoSince the late 80's, American landfills are required to be lined and equipped with water treatment facilities to preven groundwater contamination. Doesn't completely eliminate the risk of course.
- megablast 5y agoThe best thing is not to use something at all. Find a way to avoid buying useless stuff. Such as specialised tools. Especially in the kitchen.
- GuB-42 5y agoThat's how nature have dealt with trash for as long as earth has existed. Landfills are "holes in the ground", I won't deny it. But a lot is happening in these holes, will all sorts of microorganisms breaking down stuff. Well managed landfills try to minimise impact to the environment with that knowledge. In an oversimplified way, our landfills are putting oil back where it came from. Recycling and incineration are good too, but so are well managed landfills. It all depends on the situation/materials/...