3 ms·

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.
  • dllthomas 5y ago
    Maybe? Even clean plastic degrades eventually (although I don't have a sense of how the timelines compare with modern carbon sequestration approaches), and much of the waste is probably things that decompose into methane and/or CO2 much faster. Meanwhile, you're not going to get much solar power at the times of year when Sweden probably most needs energy generation. The point is very well taken from other comments, though, that pollutants other than CO2 are probably also a significant concern even if CCS is, in isolation, up to the task.
    • aperson_hello 5y ago
      On the other hand, temporary carbon sequestering is still way better than immediate release.
• marcosdumay 5y ago
  Now is not the time to burn trash. If you get carbon capture, we are better applying it to natural gas first (AKA, right now), and only extend it to trash once global warming is more under control. I'm also skeptic about the rarer pollutants. How much mercury and lead are they throwing at the environment? (Surely, it's controlled, but how well is it controlled?) What else is on that trash? (That certainly isn't controlled.) Proper trash recycling will probably use a burning stage once we get it. And I'm all for experiments on it. But I really don't think we currently have the tech to do it right, and the CO2 problem is a huge one right now.