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"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

"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.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    Another phrase for this concept is "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," something a lot of people struggle (or outright refuse) to understand.
    - ravenstine 5y ago
      Yes, exactly. And if one can't ever be satisfied with that, at least momentarily, then they are stuck in whataboutism hell.
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 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - frafra 4y 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...

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.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  Another phrase for this concept is "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," something a lot of people struggle (or outright refuse) to understand.
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    Yes, exactly. And if one can't ever be satisfied with that, at least momentarily, then they are stuck in whataboutism hell.

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 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - frafra 4y 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...