11 ms·

Sweden sends just 1% of its trash to landfills

172 points by imartin2k 5y ago

simonsarris 5y ago
"Sweden burns nearly all its trash, much of it in lieu of recycling" is an equally true but very different sounding headline. Halfway down, some controversy is mentioned: > “Waste-to-energy prevents proper recycling and makes climate change worse.” Vahk is also skeptical about the plants’ safety. “Our recent report found high levels of persistent organic pollutants like dioxins or furans around waste incinerators in three countries.” And Sweden imports trash to burn, raking in $100m/year in doing so. I'm not at all against trash incineration, especially if they are capturing the energy, but there a many incentives (financial and feel-good) to paint it one way or another. It's simply a series of tradeoffs that we should be cognizant of. I'm also not particularly against landfills, which are in a sense merely a form of carbon and pollutant sequestration. Not mentioned in the article is that many landfills also trap that methane gas and then burn it to do more or less the same energy reclamation process, and that this is potentially less energy intensive and less pollutant intensive, since they are not burning plastics etc. It would be nice if they had a comparison. Tradeoffs everywhere.
- maccard 5y ago
  > And Sweden imports trash to burn, raking in $100m/year in doing so. Which is basically nothing. Sweden's annual expenditure is $100 billion, meaning this covers 0.1% of their expenses. That's the equivalent of a person on 50k getting $50 as some offm Agreed with all of the rest of your points though!
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  >Tradeoffs everywhere. I wish every journalist writing about complex environmental topics would just start every first draft with that sentence, and then evolve it into an article.
  - spiderfarmer 5y ago
    Same goes for Youtubers who go "in depth" on futuristic technologies. They always hype you up before they introduce some realism.
    - kspacewalk2 5y ago
      Yep. Self-driving cars are a great example. They will solve every transportation-related problem a modern city has! Cue the horrible dystopian animation of an intersection without traffic lights. Sorry to be a Luddite buzzkill, but what I do if I live near one and want to walk?
      - ensignavenger 5y ago
        All you would need for that is the traditional "Walk/Don't Walk" sign. Sensors will detect when you are at the intersection, and coordinate with all the autonomous vehicles to stop so you can walk. After they have all stopped, the Walk sign will light. No need for traffic lights. That is an easily solvable problem.
  - chiefalchemist 5y ago
    Respectfully. If they were true journalist they would do this. Unfortunately, we too often get hacks posing as journalists. We, The Public, need to stop giving credit where credit is not due. Put another way, if your pet barked would you call it a cat? Of course not, yet we allow hacks to pass themselves off as journalists. Such language abuse is Orwellian, at best.
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    I've really become exhausted at the first world default assumption that something is wrong if it's not a win-win situation. Is that not a part of the psychology of many who can't accept things like nuclear and natural gas as alternatives to arguably worse solutions because there are those tradeoffs? I agree that it would be great if journalists could move from win-win thinking to tradeoffs thinking, and that's a transition that globalized societies should move towards as well.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  How does one deal with ground water pollution when just leaving trash in the ground? It must be much easier to clean pollutants like heavy metals from gases , than it is to clean whatever the rain dissolves out from under a landfill? Being Swedish, the idea of leaving trash in a hole at all feels strange. But then I'm assuming incineration is reasonably "clean" in the sense that pollutants can be filtered.
  - ddulaney 5y ago
    You generally have lots of layers of separation between trash and ground. Usually layers of clay and plastic. https://www.epa.gov/landfills/municipal-solid-waste-landfills https://www.epa.gov/landfills/municipal-solid-waste-landfill...
  - NikolaNovak 5y ago
    Being completely ignorant of the process, I don't understand how burning would possibly make it better. Let's say that you perfectly filter/capture bad stuff (and I'm extremely skeptical of both our ability to do it, and industry claims of our ability to do it). What do you do with it then... other than, put it in the ground / find some way to store it, and now we're back where we started? I think a lot of us have this childhood mental image that "burning makes stuff go away". But it doesn't!
    - alkonaut 5y ago
      If you can capture and things like heavy metals or toxins, it's obviously going to be tiny amounts. Or - the amounts are the same but having a kg of cadmium in a jar is obviously easier to handle than a kg of cadmium dissolved in 20 tons of water.
    - jltsiren 5y ago
      Incineration replaces a large problem with a smaller one. Instead of having large amounts of bulk garbage, you get a smaller amount of hazardous waste. You need a much smaller landfill. You can also choose a location that minimizes the environmental impact, even if it's much farther away, because you don't have to worry so much about logistics.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  > Tradeoffs everywhere. Indeed. Incinerators can emit 2.5 times more greenhouse gasses than coal-fired plants, according to a 2021 Earthjustice report. They emit up to 18 times more lead and 14 times more mercury, along with elevated levels of other harmful emissions, it said. ref: https://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/2022/04/01/burning-trash-poisoning-communities-in-florida-complaint-says/ https://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/2022/04/01/burning... I'm with you in that I'm not unilaterally condemning one method but it'd be helpful to have some progress-based comparisons. eg: Compared to burying, burning reduces % of methane emissions. Outputs of these toxins increases by %, primarily affecting a region of sq mi. Overall, burning [effects] CO2 by %.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    I generally agree with all the points in that report, but note they are talking about US plants, located in minority areas, that regularly fail to meet the US standards for air quality, and don't seem particularly motivated to do so for whatever reason. You can have crappy, low-tech, poorly-regulated coal plants / landfills / trash incinerators etc. that do worse than the average of examples of the same tech.
    - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
      > note they are talking about US plants, located in minority areas, The one plant I am directly familiar with is located in a rural, ~100% white area. The others may well be in minority areas.
- EGreg 5y ago
  Aren’t they just releasing toxic fumes into the atmosphere?
  - frafra 5y ago
    Not if they are built and operated correctly.
    - coffeecat 5y ago
      Where do all the nasty fluorocarbons end up? As far as I can tell, the answer is that they're simply emitted out the smokestack and into the environment.
      - ars 5y ago
        Fluorocarbons are extremely rare in household trash.
        coffeecat 5y ago
        Please define "extremely rare". They're found in many products including dental floss, clothing, furniture, carpets, pizza boxes, fishing line, and only-God-knows-what-else. It's certainly small as a mass fraction of household waste, let's say 0.01%. According to the article, European waste-to-energy plants burn 96 million tons of trash annually. So that's 9600 tons annually of fluorocarbon pollution, which will build up cumulatively in the environment because it effectively never breaks down.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - frafra 5y ago
        That is a big family of chemical compounds, so it is not easy to give an easy answer. I think that you are referring to a specific subset, fluoropolymers, also called "forever chemicals", like PTFE/Teflon/Goretex. They do not release in the air the most studied PFAS (like PFOA) under controlled condition, but more studies are needed to see if the same happens in commercially run incinerators. What is the alternative? Landfill. PFAS are more concentrated in landfills, which accept non-incinerated ashes/waste. What seems to be a valid general guideline for incineration? The higher the temperature, the better. I found a nice report if you are interested: "Disposal of products and materials containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS): A cyclical problem"
- duxup 5y ago
  Yeah I'm a little skeptical of the "we make less of this ... because we make a whole lot of that" kinda trades. Not that it can't be a good trade, but for me "less landfill" is not the biggest fight I'd want to fight ...
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "Waste-to-energy prevents proper recycling" Trouble is proper [Plastic] recycling is expensive and rarely done - in UK governmnet pays by the ton for recycling, which mostly consists of companies that pay another poorer country to take our trash, where it is usually not properly disposed of, and it ends up burnt or in the ocean. Internatuonal trash trade should really be illegal - it is fundamentally uncontrollable, full of fraud and corruption. I would rather we manage the trash here imperfectly, wherether that's landfilling or burning. At here we can have a handle on it. Edit - spesified plastic
  - Sparkle-san 5y ago
    > Trouble is proper recycling is expensive and rarely done Especially with plastics. There have been plenty of stories in the past year or two showing that it's basically all been a sham and that it just ends up in the trash. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
    - NikolaNovak 5y ago
      Thx for the link. I keep hearing and reading such articles; I need help connecting the dots though - I literally know people who work as "sorters" in local "recyling plants". Is that makeshift work? Why are we sorting, what do the recycling plants do? If there is an intentional deception on such a pervasive low level scale, that's astonishing. At the same time if there's not, what is the operational model or output of the local "recycling plants"? Are they really just sorting places that are unaware all their nicely sorted stuff ends up in same place?
      - dr_orpheus 5y ago
        No, there are still other things that are worth recycling. Sorting would separate out aluminum, paper, glass, plastic in a single stream recycling. The recycled material all gets bundled up and tested for some purity (i.e. this giant block of aluminum cans we crushed together is 98% aluminum). It is kind of more the fact that for a the blocks of aluminum, glass and paper there are buyers that can actually use that recycled material (if it is of a high enough purity) but the market for recycled plastic is small so it is likely cheaper to just throw anything plastic (or has some plastic) back in to the garbage. The purity of the recyclables has been a problem and there are companies (like AMP Robotics [0]) working on machine learning to better sort and re-sort recycled material to get it up to a purity that it is actually financially worth using and won't get abandoned and thrown in the trash. [0] https://www.amprobotics.com/ https://www.amprobotics.com/ Edit: Not to say that there isn't intentional deception as well. The most blatant example I have seen in some municipalities is a city that has a "recycling program" to make people feel good but the trash truck comes by and dumps both the trash bin and recycling bin in to the same truck.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Wow, they import all that pollution for about the ARR of a small SaaS company? Jesus, that's embarrassing.
- _pmf_ 5y ago
  "Recycling" means "the landfill is on the other half of the globe".
  - user22 5y ago
    if only, my sister was behind the recycling truck that just picked up at their house and saw it turn into the landfill.
- Aunche 5y ago
  > I'm also not particularly against landfills, which are in a sense merely a form of carbon and pollutant sequestration I personally think that landfills are underrated, but is this true? Landfills produce a lot of methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Proper landfill management includes capturing and burning that gas, that gets trapped there and is toxic if you let the pressure build up enough for it to escape.
    - aperson_hello 5y ago
      And even better management is burning that for productive purposes (like running the garbage trucks)!
  - diebeforei485 5y ago
    The methane largely comes from organic waste. A good chunk of this organic waste can instead be composted. The main benefit of composting, as I see it, isn't to enrich the soil of whatever, but to prevent greenhouse gas emissions from landfill.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  I am all against trash incineration. The bulk of it is hydrocarbons (plastics/paper etc). Burning means turning solid or liquid carbon into gaseous CO2. Imho a kilo of carbon buried in a landfill is less damaging than a kilo of it floating around the atmosphere. I've started to see a degree of synergy in landfills. Carbon is extracted from the ground in solid or liquid forms (mined coal/oil). Burning it into CO2 causes climate change. But landfills bury carbon back in the ground from whence it came, at least out of the atmosphere. Turning trash into invisible CO2 might look good but is doesn't help the climate. We might not like the sight of trash piles but we need to have a serious talk about whether burying is actually worse than releasing yet more carbon into the atmosphere. Nothing ever really goes away.
  - lancebeet 5y ago
    What you say is true, but the alternative used by neighboring countries right now is that the garbage is buried in the ground while gas, oil and coal are produced or imported and burned in the place of trash.
    - gruez 5y ago
      Only if you're only looking at it from a co2 emissions perspective. If you consider other forms of air pollution and the sibling comment is correct[1], burning garbage is probably worse than burning coal. It's definitely worse than a natural gas power plant. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30957607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30957607
  - dllthomas 5y ago
    Does your opinion change if it's coupled with proper carbon capture and sequestration?
    - sandworm101 5y ago
      >> proper carbon capture and sequestration? Just skip the burning step. Get electricity from sun/wind/nuclear and "sequester" the trash. New branding for landfills: "Early-cycle carbon sequestration and storage facilities". They could sell carbon credits for every ton of carbon they inter in their below-ground solid carbon storage facilities.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_rates_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_rates_by_country sweden isnt doing too bad at "normal recycling" (7th in that list).
- yakak 5y ago
  > “Our recent report found high levels of persistent organic pollutants like dioxins or furans around waste incinerators in three countries" That would be alarming news in a country that doesn't burn oil or coal like a dioxin junkie.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Landfill is worse than incineration with energy recovery, though both are at the bottom of the list of options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_hierarchy#/media/File:Waste_hierarchy_rect-en.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_hierarchy#/media/File:Wa...
4dahalibut 5y ago
3% of New England ISO's energy resource mix is refuse burning, about the same as wind and more than solar. https://www.iso-ne.com/about/key-stats/resource-mix/ https://www.iso-ne.com/about/key-stats/resource-mix/ . Only .4% is landfill gas.
bertil 5y ago
Like many articles on the same topic, this is very scant on the ecological consequence of burning things. Because things go “puff” and you can’t seem them doesn’t mean the problem is gone. That’s why ICE car drivers think what they do is fine. If you’d ask them how big is the cloud of toxic pollutants that they emit, they’d struggle to imagine even the scale (it’s a basic estimation based on two numbers that are in front of them at all times). This sentence is alarming and should lead to a lot more investigation than what the article gives them: > “Our recent report found high levels of persistent organic pollutants like dioxins or furans around waste incinerators in three countries.” Because dioxin is nowhere near as innocuous as CO2: that’s what Russia used to disfigure the former President of Ukraine, Victor Yushchenko. I feel like “Oh, yeah, we are releasing a lot of arsenic in the air” wouldn’t be dismissed as casually.
- frafra 5y ago
  > “Our recent report found high levels of persistent organic pollutants like dioxins or furans around waste incinerators in three countries.” Three incinerators out of...? And why a potential violation of EU regulation would mean that incineration as a hole is bad? There are plenty of incredibly clean incinerators, with emissions of dioxins and furans so low that you need to accumulate them over multiple days to be able to even detect them sometimes. If you use that recovered energy for heating, you probably avoid emitting other pollutants (even dioxins and furans). The alternative is landfill disposal of non-inert waste, which is way worse than any kind of incineration, and it is very hard and complex to manage properly. There are plenty of landfill disasters.
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    Your last paragraph is simply false.
    - frafra 5y ago
      Which part is false? "any kind of incineration" could be a broad definition, and I should have specified "any kind of incineration process compliant with modern regulation" maybe. I do not know about regulations in the US, but in EU they are pretty strict, thus incineration of non-inhert waste should be done (look for "Waste prevention and management" on the European Commission website) EU waste legislation is based on false premises, according to your comment. There have been plenty of disasters related to landfill disposal. Complexity is also there, as a lot of chemistry happens and toxic subproducts can be generated, even if the waste is not toxic in the first place, just because of interactions with the ground. The sheets used to cover the ground are easy to scratch, costly to replace, and accidental damage is often ignored. Monitoring lasts for decades or more, with greenhouse emissions. The stability of the terrain under and over landfill could also change, as there are processes that run for a long time. I would highly suggest attending a university course on waste management if your country allows you to do that for free and without registration.
legulere 5y ago
According to Eurostat Sweden has one of the highest disposal rates of waste in Europe https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=File:Waste_treatment_by_type_of_recovery_and_disposal,_2018_(%25_of_total_treatment)_30-04-2021.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... Can someone explain why how that fits together? Edit: seems to really depend on what kind of waste you are looking at. Sweden's landfill rate for waste excluding major mineral waste is still 8%: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/t2020_rt110/default/table?lang=en https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/t2020_rt110/d... the 1% target is reached only for waste collected by the municipality: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/municipal-waste-landfill-rates-in#tab-chart_1 https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/municipal-wast...
joshuaheard 5y ago
The amount of solid waste I generate daily is amazing. Most of it is from single use consumer product packaging. There should be a standardized consumer container to deliver goods, sort of a shipping container for consumers. The consumer container could be cleaned and reused, or the container destroyed and the material recycled, or the material could be biodegradable.
- picture 5y ago
  That's a great prompt for some fun industrial design especially for liquids - meeting criteria of being strong, packable, easily cleaned, easy to pour, etc. Fun!
- jacobolus 5y ago
  Every kind of packaging should be from some (very clearly visually distinguishable, e.g. with a mandated specific color) single recyclable/compostable material. No more mixed-material packages of (non-biodegradable) plastic film stuck to cardboard. No more one-off specialty plastics for packaging. No more wrapping sheets of plastic around everything. No more Mylar. No more plastic single-piece candy wrappers. No more loads of plastic tape everywhere. A lot more cardboard / waxed paper food packaging. Etc. And vendors should pay whatever the full lifecycle of their products/packaging costs. It should be possible for every consumer to easily clean and sort their waste into a relatively small number of bins, or for a recycling sorting center to easily sort mixed-stream waste into the appropriate homogeneous categories. Everything that can’t be easily sorted should be required to be biodegradable.
  - fckthisguy 5y ago
    I'm amazed more people don't push this. Germany's bottle laws (weaker now than they once were) was a clear step in the right direction. I'd love to see something similar for everything I consume.
edpichler 5y ago
Friendly reminder: read the article before commenting.
edpichler 5y ago
Despite of not being perfect in handling it, it seems no other country is doing better.
simulate-me 5y ago
I don't understand people's aversion to landfills. Perhaps it's because people intuitively understand that dumping garbage is not sustainable indefinitely, i.e. Earth will eventually run out of room. However, there is currently plenty of space for landfills. I think more things should go into landfills. Don't try to recycle plastic, just make sure it securely ends up in a landfill without ending up in the ocean and lock it away forever. That seems great. Why you'd want to take a perfectly stable thing and combust it, potentially leaking toxins into the atmosphere and environment, is beyond me.
- nso95 5y ago
  Landfills give off huge amounts of greenhouse gases
  - picture 5y ago
    The majority of which come from food waste that's left to decompose in the landfill. Those could and should be separated for composting. The released methane and stuff can also be captured.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      My council has been collecting and composting that for years. Once a year we can go and collect free compost.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  Most of the plastics I deal with is packaging. North of 60% of all packaging material was recycled. So that needs to come from somewhere.
  - picture 5y ago
    Are you including cardboard with that statistic? The majority of plastic packaging (at least where I live) are absolutely not recycled
mrcartmeneses 5y ago
The article does not state what percentage goes to the Eurovision Song Contest
pkstn 5y ago
I don't think we even have landfills anymore here in Finland
unixhero 5y ago
Sweden buys Norway's trash and sometimes Norway buy trash back to burn in central heating systems. Burn baby burn.
based69 5y ago
Can someone please explain to me why putting plastics in well managed landfills isn’t carbon capture? Like if plastics don’t break down for hundreds of years isn’t that carbon capture? And why burning it and producing co2 is environmentally friendly? I feel like I’m being gaslit
rapjr9 5y ago
An alternative to plain incineration is plasma gasification which has some advantages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification I talked to the local waste trucking company about it and was told that to build a plasma gasification plant would require handling the trash from several New England states to make it economical. Otherwise they wouldn't have enough trash to keep it fed.
enjikaka 5y ago
We burn the rest. :)

172 points by imartin2k 5y ago

"Sweden burns nearly all its trash, much of it in lieu of recycling" is an equally true but very different sounding headline. Halfway down, some controversy is mentioned: > “Waste-to-energy prevents proper recycling and makes climate change worse.” Vahk is also skeptical about the plants’ safety. “Our recent report found high levels of persistent organic pollutants like dioxins or furans around waste incinerators in three countries.” And Sweden imports trash to burn, raking in $100m/year in doing so. I'm not at all against trash incineration, especially if they are capturing the energy, but there a many incentives (financial and feel-good) to paint it one way or another. It's simply a series of tradeoffs that we should be cognizant of. I'm also not particularly against landfills, which are in a sense merely a form of carbon and pollutant sequestration. Not mentioned in the article is that many landfills also trap that methane gas and then burn it to do more or less the same energy reclamation process, and that this is potentially less energy intensive and less pollutant intensive, since they are not burning plastics etc. It would be nice if they had a comparison. Tradeoffs everywhere.

maccard 5y ago
> And Sweden imports trash to burn, raking in $100m/year in doing so. Which is basically nothing. Sweden's annual expenditure is $100 billion, meaning this covers 0.1% of their expenses. That's the equivalent of a person on 50k getting $50 as some offm Agreed with all of the rest of your points though!
kspacewalk2 5y ago
>Tradeoffs everywhere. I wish every journalist writing about complex environmental topics would just start every first draft with that sentence, and then evolve it into an article.
- spiderfarmer 5y ago
  Same goes for Youtubers who go "in depth" on futuristic technologies. They always hype you up before they introduce some realism.
  - kspacewalk2 5y ago
    Yep. Self-driving cars are a great example. They will solve every transportation-related problem a modern city has! Cue the horrible dystopian animation of an intersection without traffic lights. Sorry to be a Luddite buzzkill, but what I do if I live near one and want to walk?
    - ensignavenger 5y ago
      All you would need for that is the traditional "Walk/Don't Walk" sign. Sensors will detect when you are at the intersection, and coordinate with all the autonomous vehicles to stop so you can walk. After they have all stopped, the Walk sign will light. No need for traffic lights. That is an easily solvable problem.
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  Respectfully. If they were true journalist they would do this. Unfortunately, we too often get hacks posing as journalists. We, The Public, need to stop giving credit where credit is not due. Put another way, if your pet barked would you call it a cat? Of course not, yet we allow hacks to pass themselves off as journalists. Such language abuse is Orwellian, at best.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  I've really become exhausted at the first world default assumption that something is wrong if it's not a win-win situation. Is that not a part of the psychology of many who can't accept things like nuclear and natural gas as alternatives to arguably worse solutions because there are those tradeoffs? I agree that it would be great if journalists could move from win-win thinking to tradeoffs thinking, and that's a transition that globalized societies should move towards as well.
alkonaut 5y ago
How does one deal with ground water pollution when just leaving trash in the ground? It must be much easier to clean pollutants like heavy metals from gases , than it is to clean whatever the rain dissolves out from under a landfill? Being Swedish, the idea of leaving trash in a hole at all feels strange. But then I'm assuming incineration is reasonably "clean" in the sense that pollutants can be filtered.
- ddulaney 5y ago
  You generally have lots of layers of separation between trash and ground. Usually layers of clay and plastic. https://www.epa.gov/landfills/municipal-solid-waste-landfills https://www.epa.gov/landfills/municipal-solid-waste-landfill...
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  Being completely ignorant of the process, I don't understand how burning would possibly make it better. Let's say that you perfectly filter/capture bad stuff (and I'm extremely skeptical of both our ability to do it, and industry claims of our ability to do it). What do you do with it then... other than, put it in the ground / find some way to store it, and now we're back where we started? I think a lot of us have this childhood mental image that "burning makes stuff go away". But it doesn't!
  - alkonaut 5y ago
    If you can capture and things like heavy metals or toxins, it's obviously going to be tiny amounts. Or - the amounts are the same but having a kg of cadmium in a jar is obviously easier to handle than a kg of cadmium dissolved in 20 tons of water.
  - jltsiren 5y ago
    Incineration replaces a large problem with a smaller one. Instead of having large amounts of bulk garbage, you get a smaller amount of hazardous waste. You need a much smaller landfill. You can also choose a location that minimizes the environmental impact, even if it's much farther away, because you don't have to worry so much about logistics.
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
> Tradeoffs everywhere. Indeed. Incinerators can emit 2.5 times more greenhouse gasses than coal-fired plants, according to a 2021 Earthjustice report. They emit up to 18 times more lead and 14 times more mercury, along with elevated levels of other harmful emissions, it said. ref: https://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/2022/04/01/burning-trash-poisoning-communities-in-florida-complaint-says/ https://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/2022/04/01/burning... I'm with you in that I'm not unilaterally condemning one method but it'd be helpful to have some progress-based comparisons. eg: Compared to burying, burning reduces % of methane emissions. Outputs of these toxins increases by %, primarily affecting a region of sq mi. Overall, burning [effects] CO2 by %.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  I generally agree with all the points in that report, but note they are talking about US plants, located in minority areas, that regularly fail to meet the US standards for air quality, and don't seem particularly motivated to do so for whatever reason. You can have crappy, low-tech, poorly-regulated coal plants / landfills / trash incinerators etc. that do worse than the average of examples of the same tech.
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    > note they are talking about US plants, located in minority areas, The one plant I am directly familiar with is located in a rural, ~100% white area. The others may well be in minority areas.
EGreg 5y ago
Aren’t they just releasing toxic fumes into the atmosphere?
- frafra 5y ago
  Not if they are built and operated correctly.
  - coffeecat 5y ago
    Where do all the nasty fluorocarbons end up? As far as I can tell, the answer is that they're simply emitted out the smokestack and into the environment.
    - ars 5y ago
      Fluorocarbons are extremely rare in household trash.
      - coffeecat 5y ago
        Please define "extremely rare". They're found in many products including dental floss, clothing, furniture, carpets, pizza boxes, fishing line, and only-God-knows-what-else. It's certainly small as a mass fraction of household waste, let's say 0.01%. According to the article, European waste-to-energy plants burn 96 million tons of trash annually. So that's 9600 tons annually of fluorocarbon pollution, which will build up cumulatively in the environment because it effectively never breaks down.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - frafra 5y ago
      That is a big family of chemical compounds, so it is not easy to give an easy answer. I think that you are referring to a specific subset, fluoropolymers, also called "forever chemicals", like PTFE/Teflon/Goretex. They do not release in the air the most studied PFAS (like PFOA) under controlled condition, but more studies are needed to see if the same happens in commercially run incinerators. What is the alternative? Landfill. PFAS are more concentrated in landfills, which accept non-incinerated ashes/waste. What seems to be a valid general guideline for incineration? The higher the temperature, the better. I found a nice report if you are interested: "Disposal of products and materials containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS): A cyclical problem"
duxup 5y ago
Yeah I'm a little skeptical of the "we make less of this ... because we make a whole lot of that" kinda trades. Not that it can't be a good trade, but for me "less landfill" is not the biggest fight I'd want to fight ...
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"Waste-to-energy prevents proper recycling" Trouble is proper [Plastic] recycling is expensive and rarely done - in UK governmnet pays by the ton for recycling, which mostly consists of companies that pay another poorer country to take our trash, where it is usually not properly disposed of, and it ends up burnt or in the ocean. Internatuonal trash trade should really be illegal - it is fundamentally uncontrollable, full of fraud and corruption. I would rather we manage the trash here imperfectly, wherether that's landfilling or burning. At here we can have a handle on it. Edit - spesified plastic
- Sparkle-san 5y ago
  > Trouble is proper recycling is expensive and rarely done Especially with plastics. There have been plenty of stories in the past year or two showing that it's basically all been a sham and that it just ends up in the trash. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
  - NikolaNovak 5y ago
    Thx for the link. I keep hearing and reading such articles; I need help connecting the dots though - I literally know people who work as "sorters" in local "recyling plants". Is that makeshift work? Why are we sorting, what do the recycling plants do? If there is an intentional deception on such a pervasive low level scale, that's astonishing. At the same time if there's not, what is the operational model or output of the local "recycling plants"? Are they really just sorting places that are unaware all their nicely sorted stuff ends up in same place?
    - dr_orpheus 5y ago
      No, there are still other things that are worth recycling. Sorting would separate out aluminum, paper, glass, plastic in a single stream recycling. The recycled material all gets bundled up and tested for some purity (i.e. this giant block of aluminum cans we crushed together is 98% aluminum). It is kind of more the fact that for a the blocks of aluminum, glass and paper there are buyers that can actually use that recycled material (if it is of a high enough purity) but the market for recycled plastic is small so it is likely cheaper to just throw anything plastic (or has some plastic) back in to the garbage. The purity of the recyclables has been a problem and there are companies (like AMP Robotics [0]) working on machine learning to better sort and re-sort recycled material to get it up to a purity that it is actually financially worth using and won't get abandoned and thrown in the trash. [0] https://www.amprobotics.com/ https://www.amprobotics.com/ Edit: Not to say that there isn't intentional deception as well. The most blatant example I have seen in some municipalities is a city that has a "recycling program" to make people feel good but the trash truck comes by and dumps both the trash bin and recycling bin in to the same truck.
renewiltord 5y ago
Wow, they import all that pollution for about the ARR of a small SaaS company? Jesus, that's embarrassing.
_pmf_ 5y ago
"Recycling" means "the landfill is on the other half of the globe".
- user22 5y ago
  if only, my sister was behind the recycling truck that just picked up at their house and saw it turn into the landfill.
Aunche 5y ago
> I'm also not particularly against landfills, which are in a sense merely a form of carbon and pollutant sequestration I personally think that landfills are underrated, but is this true? Landfills produce a lot of methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Proper landfill management includes capturing and burning that gas, that gets trapped there and is toxic if you let the pressure build up enough for it to escape.
  - aperson_hello 5y ago
    And even better management is burning that for productive purposes (like running the garbage trucks)!
- diebeforei485 5y ago
  The methane largely comes from organic waste. A good chunk of this organic waste can instead be composted. The main benefit of composting, as I see it, isn't to enrich the soil of whatever, but to prevent greenhouse gas emissions from landfill.
sandworm101 5y ago
I am all against trash incineration. The bulk of it is hydrocarbons (plastics/paper etc). Burning means turning solid or liquid carbon into gaseous CO2. Imho a kilo of carbon buried in a landfill is less damaging than a kilo of it floating around the atmosphere. I've started to see a degree of synergy in landfills. Carbon is extracted from the ground in solid or liquid forms (mined coal/oil). Burning it into CO2 causes climate change. But landfills bury carbon back in the ground from whence it came, at least out of the atmosphere. Turning trash into invisible CO2 might look good but is doesn't help the climate. We might not like the sight of trash piles but we need to have a serious talk about whether burying is actually worse than releasing yet more carbon into the atmosphere. Nothing ever really goes away.
- lancebeet 5y ago
  What you say is true, but the alternative used by neighboring countries right now is that the garbage is buried in the ground while gas, oil and coal are produced or imported and burned in the place of trash.
  - gruez 5y ago
    Only if you're only looking at it from a co2 emissions perspective. If you consider other forms of air pollution and the sibling comment is correct[1], burning garbage is probably worse than burning coal. It's definitely worse than a natural gas power plant. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30957607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30957607
- dllthomas 5y ago
  Does your opinion change if it's coupled with proper carbon capture and sequestration?
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    >> proper carbon capture and sequestration? Just skip the burning step. Get electricity from sun/wind/nuclear and "sequester" the trash. New branding for landfills: "Early-cycle carbon sequestration and storage facilities". They could sell carbon credits for every ton of carbon they inter in their below-ground solid carbon storage facilities.
SahAssar 5y ago
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_rates_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_rates_by_country sweden isnt doing too bad at "normal recycling" (7th in that list).
yakak 5y ago
> “Our recent report found high levels of persistent organic pollutants like dioxins or furans around waste incinerators in three countries" That would be alarming news in a country that doesn't burn oil or coal like a dioxin junkie.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Landfill is worse than incineration with energy recovery, though both are at the bottom of the list of options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_hierarchy#/media/File:Waste_hierarchy_rect-en.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_hierarchy#/media/File:Wa...

4dahalibut 5y ago

3% of New England ISO's energy resource mix is refuse burning, about the same as wind and more than solar. https://www.iso-ne.com/about/key-stats/resource-mix/ https://www.iso-ne.com/about/key-stats/resource-mix/ . Only .4% is landfill gas.

bertil 5y ago

Like many articles on the same topic, this is very scant on the ecological consequence of burning things. Because things go “puff” and you can’t seem them doesn’t mean the problem is gone. That’s why ICE car drivers think what they do is fine. If you’d ask them how big is the cloud of toxic pollutants that they emit, they’d struggle to imagine even the scale (it’s a basic estimation based on two numbers that are in front of them at all times). This sentence is alarming and should lead to a lot more investigation than what the article gives them: > “Our recent report found high levels of persistent organic pollutants like dioxins or furans around waste incinerators in three countries.” Because dioxin is nowhere near as innocuous as CO2: that’s what Russia used to disfigure the former President of Ukraine, Victor Yushchenko. I feel like “Oh, yeah, we are releasing a lot of arsenic in the air” wouldn’t be dismissed as casually.

frafra 5y ago
> “Our recent report found high levels of persistent organic pollutants like dioxins or furans around waste incinerators in three countries.” Three incinerators out of...? And why a potential violation of EU regulation would mean that incineration as a hole is bad? There are plenty of incredibly clean incinerators, with emissions of dioxins and furans so low that you need to accumulate them over multiple days to be able to even detect them sometimes. If you use that recovered energy for heating, you probably avoid emitting other pollutants (even dioxins and furans). The alternative is landfill disposal of non-inert waste, which is way worse than any kind of incineration, and it is very hard and complex to manage properly. There are plenty of landfill disasters.
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  Your last paragraph is simply false.
  - frafra 5y ago
    Which part is false? "any kind of incineration" could be a broad definition, and I should have specified "any kind of incineration process compliant with modern regulation" maybe. I do not know about regulations in the US, but in EU they are pretty strict, thus incineration of non-inhert waste should be done (look for "Waste prevention and management" on the European Commission website) EU waste legislation is based on false premises, according to your comment. There have been plenty of disasters related to landfill disposal. Complexity is also there, as a lot of chemistry happens and toxic subproducts can be generated, even if the waste is not toxic in the first place, just because of interactions with the ground. The sheets used to cover the ground are easy to scratch, costly to replace, and accidental damage is often ignored. Monitoring lasts for decades or more, with greenhouse emissions. The stability of the terrain under and over landfill could also change, as there are processes that run for a long time. I would highly suggest attending a university course on waste management if your country allows you to do that for free and without registration.

legulere 5y ago

According to Eurostat Sweden has one of the highest disposal rates of waste in Europe https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=File:Waste_treatment_by_type_of_recovery_and_disposal,_2018_(%25_of_total_treatment)_30-04-2021.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... Can someone explain why how that fits together? Edit: seems to really depend on what kind of waste you are looking at. Sweden's landfill rate for waste excluding major mineral waste is still 8%: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/t2020_rt110/default/table?lang=en https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/t2020_rt110/d... the 1% target is reached only for waste collected by the municipality: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/municipal-waste-landfill-rates-in#tab-chart_1 https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/municipal-wast...

joshuaheard 5y ago

The amount of solid waste I generate daily is amazing. Most of it is from single use consumer product packaging. There should be a standardized consumer container to deliver goods, sort of a shipping container for consumers. The consumer container could be cleaned and reused, or the container destroyed and the material recycled, or the material could be biodegradable.

picture 5y ago
That's a great prompt for some fun industrial design especially for liquids - meeting criteria of being strong, packable, easily cleaned, easy to pour, etc. Fun!
jacobolus 5y ago
Every kind of packaging should be from some (very clearly visually distinguishable, e.g. with a mandated specific color) single recyclable/compostable material. No more mixed-material packages of (non-biodegradable) plastic film stuck to cardboard. No more one-off specialty plastics for packaging. No more wrapping sheets of plastic around everything. No more Mylar. No more plastic single-piece candy wrappers. No more loads of plastic tape everywhere. A lot more cardboard / waxed paper food packaging. Etc. And vendors should pay whatever the full lifecycle of their products/packaging costs. It should be possible for every consumer to easily clean and sort their waste into a relatively small number of bins, or for a recycling sorting center to easily sort mixed-stream waste into the appropriate homogeneous categories. Everything that can’t be easily sorted should be required to be biodegradable.
- fckthisguy 5y ago
  I'm amazed more people don't push this. Germany's bottle laws (weaker now than they once were) was a clear step in the right direction. I'd love to see something similar for everything I consume.

edpichler 5y ago

Friendly reminder: read the article before commenting.

edpichler 5y ago

Despite of not being perfect in handling it, it seems no other country is doing better.

simulate-me 5y ago

I don't understand people's aversion to landfills. Perhaps it's because people intuitively understand that dumping garbage is not sustainable indefinitely, i.e. Earth will eventually run out of room. However, there is currently plenty of space for landfills. I think more things should go into landfills. Don't try to recycle plastic, just make sure it securely ends up in a landfill without ending up in the ocean and lock it away forever. That seems great. Why you'd want to take a perfectly stable thing and combust it, potentially leaking toxins into the atmosphere and environment, is beyond me.

nso95 5y ago
Landfills give off huge amounts of greenhouse gases
- picture 5y ago
  The majority of which come from food waste that's left to decompose in the landfill. Those could and should be separated for composting. The released methane and stuff can also be captured.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    My council has been collecting and composting that for years. Once a year we can go and collect free compost.
alkonaut 5y ago
Most of the plastics I deal with is packaging. North of 60% of all packaging material was recycled. So that needs to come from somewhere.
- picture 5y ago
  Are you including cardboard with that statistic? The majority of plastic packaging (at least where I live) are absolutely not recycled

mrcartmeneses 5y ago

The article does not state what percentage goes to the Eurovision Song Contest

pkstn 5y ago

I don't think we even have landfills anymore here in Finland

unixhero 5y ago

Sweden buys Norway's trash and sometimes Norway buy trash back to burn in central heating systems. Burn baby burn.

based69 5y ago

Can someone please explain to me why putting plastics in well managed landfills isn’t carbon capture? Like if plastics don’t break down for hundreds of years isn’t that carbon capture? And why burning it and producing co2 is environmentally friendly? I feel like I’m being gaslit

rapjr9 5y ago

An alternative to plain incineration is plasma gasification which has some advantages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification I talked to the local waste trucking company about it and was told that to build a plasma gasification plant would require handling the trash from several New England states to make it economical. Otherwise they wouldn't have enough trash to keep it fed.

enjikaka 5y ago

We burn the rest. :)