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Yes, the US is a country that cannot process its own waste so it ships it overseas just to be rid of it. The solution is not to raise money and send it to the P

Yes, the US is a country that cannot process its own waste so it ships it overseas just to be rid of it. The solution is not to raise money and send it to the Philippines to build landfills. The solution is to actually recycle plastic, build circular supply chains, and use biodegradable materials as much as possible. If humans are to stay on this planet, in the long term we cannot just keep piling up garbage in landfills and building on top of it. Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land. Its going to be a lot better if we just make our waste as recyclable as possible in the first place. The author is recommending a half measure based on the assumption that the US cannot fix its own problems. They are also implying a false equivalency: banning single use plastics is not the same as recycling plastic. A more equivalent comparison might be the tradeoffs between plastic bottles for soda, water, or oils and glass or metal containers. It is also true that plastic straws are a much smaller problem then other usages of plastic such as bottles or event fishing gear and even bags. Yet there is nothing inherently wrong with reducing plastic usage. Doing so is smart and will be important for the health and well being of future generations -- human and nonhuman -- of life on earth.

alfor 4y ago
I think we are not in a position to judge what is reasonable to do over hundred or thousand of years with our current technological progression. Plastics where not really a thing 100 years ago. At our current progression I think we should avoid the big catastrophes (Nuclear war), push for developpement of poor places(get more genius) and advance technology as fast as we can. At this speed of advancement in less than 100 years I am sure we will have figure out something for the plastic we have generated meanwhile.
- Syonyk 4y ago
  > At this speed of advancement in less than 100 years I am sure we will have figure out something for the plastic we have generated meanwhile. The problem is that today's plastic, in far less than 100 years, is reasonably likely to be finely divided into small numbers of molecule sized chunks, and spread evenly throughout the entire biological systems of the planet. We find microplastic in ants in the middle of untouched forestland, because it spreads so well on the wind. > ...and advance technology as fast as we can. It's an interesting gamble, certainly - solving the problems created by our current technological development path by pushing further down that development path. It's just not one I expect to work. You don't generally solve problems by "doing more of what made them in the first place."
  - playpause 4y ago
    Your implied plan (doing less of what made the problem in the first place) seems like more of a stretch to me. It would be nice, but I can’t see many countries giving up plastic. It’s too useful. I think focusing international collaboration efforts on better waste/pollution management (eg getting more waste plastic into properly managed landfills) seems a lot more plausible.
    - Syonyk 4y ago
      I may not have explicitly stated it in the parent comment, but it's quite explicit other places. Either a system is sustainable or it's not. If it is, it can continue forever. And, if it's not, it won't. One way or another, it won't, though you can pick the method early on, and later, reality will force it on you. The history of civilization collapse is the history of this reality being forced on groups of people who thought it didn't apply to them. Plastics in their current form won't exist as new products in 1000 years (though the current stuff probably won't have broken down entirely). Either something far less vile and toxic to "all life" will have been found, or, more likely, industrial civilization will have done the usual "overshoot and collapse" thing, so we won't have the technology to make them in their current form then. None of that changes the fact that plastic are toxic to life now - and, so, we ought not be using nearly as much of them. I don't mind "durable plastics" quite as much, but the bulk of it is single use, and splitting out all our recycling, I'm regularly reminded of just how much plastic one cannot avoid, even when trying to minimize it. If the reality (which it probably is...) is that people won't stop doing anything until the external reality we live in forces their hand, the outcomes are almost always far worse than if we decide to stop doing those things earlier. Plastics are convenient, certainly. They're also a horrid biotoxin that has, quite literally, blanketed the planet in the form of microplastics. We have no idea what to do with the stuff, and burying it only works for so long (and if you're really careful to not let the bits and pieces leech into groundwater). But, I mean, at least you can get water without having to use a drinking fountain!
      - Retric 4y ago
        Plastics aren’t a system. Some plastics are likely to be manufactured in 100,000 years simply because their made from abundant atoms, non toxic, and have useful properties. The current global economy on the other hand isn’t stable across months let alone hundreds of years. But that doesn’t matter much, the meat your eating today probably didn’t come from a wild animal like the meat your ancestors where eating 100,000 years ago but it’s still edible. Different systems to produce essentially the same thing across vast stretches of time.
munk-a 4y ago
An alternative solution, that this article weirdly doesn't touch on, is that the US could also shift policy to stop exporting recycling material. It'd be nice to encourage expanded recycling domestically but if that fails and if ~80% of exported material is going to end up improperly dumped then it'd be far more reasonable to just make sure it's properly dumped in the US. Make the export of detritus illegal, send the excess to dumps, and if Americans deem this offensive then they can legislate additional subsidies for domestic recycling (even potentially becoming a net importer of detritus!).
- themeiguoren 4y ago
  Agreed. If the issue is that recycling plastic is uneconomical and so it gets shipped out to places that pollute it, the solution is for the recycling centers to stop shipping it out. Or just accept metal-only recycling. This is something to fix at the municipality level.
cortesoft 4y ago
> If humans are to stay on this planet, in the long term we cannot just keep piling up garbage in landfills and building on top of it. Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land. Its going to be a lot better if we just make our waste as recyclable as possible in the first place. Landfill space is not the issue at all. Landfills do not take up that much physical space, and we have plenty of empty space to use. The issue is around the greenhouse gases released creating all of those disposable products and the resources going into their production. If it was just landfill space, we would be totally fine.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  Also... > Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land. Over that time scale the land automatically remediates itself. There's a hill in Rome made of a big pile of Roman garbage. The hill is more useful than the pots were.
  - dvtrn 4y ago
    Boston as well, iirc. And parts of Chicago (a city that was built ontop of an actual swamp)
    - robonerd 4y ago
      Related; In mid 19th century, Entire neighborhoods of Chicago were lifted up on jackscrews to raise the street above the swamp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
      - dvtrn 4y ago
        Yep! I love my city for a lot of reasons but stuff like this are some of my favorite bits of Chicagoland trivia.
      - solveit 4y ago
        We were able to lift entire neighbourhoods in the 19th century but now we can't even build houses...
bko 4y ago
> If humans are to stay on this planet, in the long term we cannot just keep piling up garbage in landfills and building on top of it. Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land. Its going to be a lot better if we just make our waste as recyclable as possible in the first place. From the article linked below: If you took all the trash that the United States would generate in 100 years and piled it up in the shape of the Great Pyramid, it would be about 32 times bigger. So the base of this trash pyramid would be about 4.5 miles by 4.5 miles, and the pyramid would rise almost 3 miles high. That's a big landfill but its just not true that its unsustainable. That's ignoring all the advancements we'll make over the 100 years to harvest that garbage or further increase efficiency of landfills. https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/one-giant-landfill.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-scienc...
- anamax 4y ago
  > So the base of this [100 years] trash pyramid would be about 4.5 miles by 4.5 miles, and the pyramid would rise almost 3 miles high. > That's a big landfill but its just not true that its unsustainable. That is NOT a big landfill. That volume could be easily hidden in all but a couple of US states. Moreover, it is a concentrated supply of many useful materials. It might not be profitable to mine it today, but if the "earth is running out of resources" people are correct, it will be. (And, if they're not, generating trash isn't a problem.)
  - antisthenes 4y ago
    A Landfill would also generate a ton of usable energy in the form of landfill gas, which can either be used for heating, or concentrated/scrubbed and used as an equivalent of natural gas.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    > The biggest mining operation on Earth can be found in Germany. At the Garzweiler strip mine they remove the top ground layer to extract lignite. The total mining surface is a staggering 18,5 ml² (48 km²) and several villages had to be moved for the mining operation. The trash pyramid is 100 cubic kilometers, that could fit in a few of the biggest open pit mines.
Syonyk 4y ago
> The solution is to actually recycle plastic, build circular supply chains, and use biodegradable materials as much as possible. This assumes that: (1) Plastic can actually be recycled. Unlike a lot of other materials, it degrades rather substantially every time you try, and plastic quality coming out of recycling isn't generally uniform enough to make anything more than the big, chunky "recycled plastic toys and benches" you'll occasionally see. More and more, it's evident that "plastic recycling" is a myth mostly funded by plastic producers and crew, who wish to have it be seen as "not the terror it actually is." Hard on profits, you know, if people don't like your product. The Guardian has done some great work on the truths behind plastic recycling, and they're not pretty. That's before you get into the biological impacts of microplastics on "literally everything on the planet that's alive." And, (2) that "biodegradable materials" actually do that in realistic end of life conditions. They don't. People date landfill digs by reading the headlines on the newspapers that are "slightly yellowed compared to when they were buried." Treating plastic as the life-toxic sludge it is would be a far better start. At least with metal recycling, we know it's actually being put back into a smelter for recycling, and that it uses far less energy than the original materials (though "pure circular" with most metals is still a problem as they just dilute the various alloys down with virgin metal enough to make the additives not a problem in current systems). "Oh, it's fine, it's recycled!" leads to far more plastic use than "No, we literally can't do anything with it, the best we can do is go burn it to offset coal use" (which is what my local area does with plastic, as it seems to have the best impact for the least cost, and the burn temperature is probably hot enough to decompose all the nasties...).
- robonerd 4y ago
  Many kinds of plastics can't be recycled at all, not even downcycled. Thermoset plastics particularly, which includes almost everything made out of fiberglass (glass fibers in thermoset plastic matrix.) That stuff either gets thrown into a landfill, or ground up and burnt.
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    That most of it burns is part of why "go burn it to offset coal" came out so well in some of the lifecycle analysis for end of life program I'm familiar with: https://www.hefty.com/sites/default/files/2021-01/Hefty-EnergyBag-Program-Life-Cycle-Assessment-Aug-2020.pdf https://www.hefty.com/sites/default/files/2021-01/Hefty-Ener... Instead of having to pay to sort and process, you just grind it up and mix it in with the coal (or heave the bags in, I'm not sure as to the actual feed mechanism though I keep meaning to see if I can get a tour). I'm not actually in the program area, but I know where to drop my bags of plastic to get them into the program (one of the recycling companies in the area of the program handles it, and I'm over there often enough that I'll toss a few of the bags in the back of the car if I'm going that way).
kube-system 4y ago
Plastic recycling is simply not very practical in the current day. Solving that problem is certainly something we should strive for, but plastic isn't going anywhere any time soon. We need something to do with it today and the most environmentally friendly thing to do is to landfill it. If at some point in the future we have a good solution to recycle it, we'll know where to find it. But if we keep dumping it in the ocean we'll probably cause other disasters before we'd ever run out of empty space.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  > Plastic recycling is simply not very practical in the current day. Of course it is practical. Here in Norway we recycle about 30% of all plastic from domestic and industrial waste already. We have some way to go though, glass and metal is over 80%. Some plastic is especially well suited to re-use; for instance, we recycle 73% of PET used for drinks containers. See https://bellona.no/assets/Avfall-Rapport-5.pdf https://bellona.no/assets/Avfall-Rapport-5.pdf
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Or in other words, even with only 5 million people’s plastic in a rich liberal western democracy, you still can’t manage to recycle the vast majority of your plastic. That 70% needs to go somewhere, and a landfill is the best place for it. Not an incinerator, a low income country, or the bottom of the ocean.
    - kwhitefoot 4y ago
      Or in yet other words, it takes time to change the habits of a thousand years. None of it goes to a low income country, and very little to the ocean. And our plastic waste per person is less than half of that of the US. Reducing plastic waste isn't merely a question of recycling, one must decide which plastics to allow for which purposes so that recycling can be effective. But not using it in the first place is the most effective. And lastly what does the population of the country have to do with the problem? I this mentioned over and over again in various contexts.
dr_dshiv 4y ago
Let’s think positively here, people. Clearly we just need to invent a straw that you can eat afterwards. Maybe it turns into chewing gum?
squam 4y ago
I don't disagree with anything you said. But as an individual, I can at least heed the advice to not attempt to recycle plastics if I'm not certain it won't ultimately end up in the ocean. The landfill is the lesser of two evils.

alfor 4y ago

I think we are not in a position to judge what is reasonable to do over hundred or thousand of years with our current technological progression. Plastics where not really a thing 100 years ago. At our current progression I think we should avoid the big catastrophes (Nuclear war), push for developpement of poor places(get more genius) and advance technology as fast as we can. At this speed of advancement in less than 100 years I am sure we will have figure out something for the plastic we have generated meanwhile.

Syonyk 4y ago
> At this speed of advancement in less than 100 years I am sure we will have figure out something for the plastic we have generated meanwhile. The problem is that today's plastic, in far less than 100 years, is reasonably likely to be finely divided into small numbers of molecule sized chunks, and spread evenly throughout the entire biological systems of the planet. We find microplastic in ants in the middle of untouched forestland, because it spreads so well on the wind. > ...and advance technology as fast as we can. It's an interesting gamble, certainly - solving the problems created by our current technological development path by pushing further down that development path. It's just not one I expect to work. You don't generally solve problems by "doing more of what made them in the first place."
- playpause 4y ago
  Your implied plan (doing less of what made the problem in the first place) seems like more of a stretch to me. It would be nice, but I can’t see many countries giving up plastic. It’s too useful. I think focusing international collaboration efforts on better waste/pollution management (eg getting more waste plastic into properly managed landfills) seems a lot more plausible.
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    I may not have explicitly stated it in the parent comment, but it's quite explicit other places. Either a system is sustainable or it's not. If it is, it can continue forever. And, if it's not, it won't. One way or another, it won't, though you can pick the method early on, and later, reality will force it on you. The history of civilization collapse is the history of this reality being forced on groups of people who thought it didn't apply to them. Plastics in their current form won't exist as new products in 1000 years (though the current stuff probably won't have broken down entirely). Either something far less vile and toxic to "all life" will have been found, or, more likely, industrial civilization will have done the usual "overshoot and collapse" thing, so we won't have the technology to make them in their current form then. None of that changes the fact that plastic are toxic to life now - and, so, we ought not be using nearly as much of them. I don't mind "durable plastics" quite as much, but the bulk of it is single use, and splitting out all our recycling, I'm regularly reminded of just how much plastic one cannot avoid, even when trying to minimize it. If the reality (which it probably is...) is that people won't stop doing anything until the external reality we live in forces their hand, the outcomes are almost always far worse than if we decide to stop doing those things earlier. Plastics are convenient, certainly. They're also a horrid biotoxin that has, quite literally, blanketed the planet in the form of microplastics. We have no idea what to do with the stuff, and burying it only works for so long (and if you're really careful to not let the bits and pieces leech into groundwater). But, I mean, at least you can get water without having to use a drinking fountain!
    - Retric 4y ago
      Plastics aren’t a system. Some plastics are likely to be manufactured in 100,000 years simply because their made from abundant atoms, non toxic, and have useful properties. The current global economy on the other hand isn’t stable across months let alone hundreds of years. But that doesn’t matter much, the meat your eating today probably didn’t come from a wild animal like the meat your ancestors where eating 100,000 years ago but it’s still edible. Different systems to produce essentially the same thing across vast stretches of time.

munk-a 4y ago

An alternative solution, that this article weirdly doesn't touch on, is that the US could also shift policy to stop exporting recycling material. It'd be nice to encourage expanded recycling domestically but if that fails and if ~80% of exported material is going to end up improperly dumped then it'd be far more reasonable to just make sure it's properly dumped in the US. Make the export of detritus illegal, send the excess to dumps, and if Americans deem this offensive then they can legislate additional subsidies for domestic recycling (even potentially becoming a net importer of detritus!).

themeiguoren 4y ago
Agreed. If the issue is that recycling plastic is uneconomical and so it gets shipped out to places that pollute it, the solution is for the recycling centers to stop shipping it out. Or just accept metal-only recycling. This is something to fix at the municipality level.

cortesoft 4y ago

thaumasiotes 4y ago
Also... > Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land. Over that time scale the land automatically remediates itself. There's a hill in Rome made of a big pile of Roman garbage. The hill is more useful than the pots were.
- dvtrn 4y ago
  Boston as well, iirc. And parts of Chicago (a city that was built ontop of an actual swamp)
  - robonerd 4y ago
    Related; In mid 19th century, Entire neighborhoods of Chicago were lifted up on jackscrews to raise the street above the swamp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
    - dvtrn 4y ago
      Yep! I love my city for a lot of reasons but stuff like this are some of my favorite bits of Chicagoland trivia.
    - solveit 4y ago
      We were able to lift entire neighbourhoods in the 19th century but now we can't even build houses...

bko 4y ago

> If humans are to stay on this planet, in the long term we cannot just keep piling up garbage in landfills and building on top of it. Eventually, in hundreds or thousands of years we will have to remediate that land. Its going to be a lot better if we just make our waste as recyclable as possible in the first place. From the article linked below: If you took all the trash that the United States would generate in 100 years and piled it up in the shape of the Great Pyramid, it would be about 32 times bigger. So the base of this trash pyramid would be about 4.5 miles by 4.5 miles, and the pyramid would rise almost 3 miles high. That's a big landfill but its just not true that its unsustainable. That's ignoring all the advancements we'll make over the 100 years to harvest that garbage or further increase efficiency of landfills. https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/one-giant-landfill.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-scienc...

anamax 4y ago
> So the base of this [100 years] trash pyramid would be about 4.5 miles by 4.5 miles, and the pyramid would rise almost 3 miles high. > That's a big landfill but its just not true that its unsustainable. That is NOT a big landfill. That volume could be easily hidden in all but a couple of US states. Moreover, it is a concentrated supply of many useful materials. It might not be profitable to mine it today, but if the "earth is running out of resources" people are correct, it will be. (And, if they're not, generating trash isn't a problem.)
- antisthenes 4y ago
  A Landfill would also generate a ton of usable energy in the form of landfill gas, which can either be used for heating, or concentrated/scrubbed and used as an equivalent of natural gas.
- bombcar 4y ago
  > The biggest mining operation on Earth can be found in Germany. At the Garzweiler strip mine they remove the top ground layer to extract lignite. The total mining surface is a staggering 18,5 ml² (48 km²) and several villages had to be moved for the mining operation. The trash pyramid is 100 cubic kilometers, that could fit in a few of the biggest open pit mines.

Syonyk 4y ago

> The solution is to actually recycle plastic, build circular supply chains, and use biodegradable materials as much as possible. This assumes that: (1) Plastic can actually be recycled. Unlike a lot of other materials, it degrades rather substantially every time you try, and plastic quality coming out of recycling isn't generally uniform enough to make anything more than the big, chunky "recycled plastic toys and benches" you'll occasionally see. More and more, it's evident that "plastic recycling" is a myth mostly funded by plastic producers and crew, who wish to have it be seen as "not the terror it actually is." Hard on profits, you know, if people don't like your product. The Guardian has done some great work on the truths behind plastic recycling, and they're not pretty. That's before you get into the biological impacts of microplastics on "literally everything on the planet that's alive." And, (2) that "biodegradable materials" actually do that in realistic end of life conditions. They don't. People date landfill digs by reading the headlines on the newspapers that are "slightly yellowed compared to when they were buried." Treating plastic as the life-toxic sludge it is would be a far better start. At least with metal recycling, we know it's actually being put back into a smelter for recycling, and that it uses far less energy than the original materials (though "pure circular" with most metals is still a problem as they just dilute the various alloys down with virgin metal enough to make the additives not a problem in current systems). "Oh, it's fine, it's recycled!" leads to far more plastic use than "No, we literally can't do anything with it, the best we can do is go burn it to offset coal use" (which is what my local area does with plastic, as it seems to have the best impact for the least cost, and the burn temperature is probably hot enough to decompose all the nasties...).

robonerd 4y ago
Many kinds of plastics can't be recycled at all, not even downcycled. Thermoset plastics particularly, which includes almost everything made out of fiberglass (glass fibers in thermoset plastic matrix.) That stuff either gets thrown into a landfill, or ground up and burnt.
- Syonyk 4y ago
  That most of it burns is part of why "go burn it to offset coal" came out so well in some of the lifecycle analysis for end of life program I'm familiar with: https://www.hefty.com/sites/default/files/2021-01/Hefty-EnergyBag-Program-Life-Cycle-Assessment-Aug-2020.pdf https://www.hefty.com/sites/default/files/2021-01/Hefty-Ener... Instead of having to pay to sort and process, you just grind it up and mix it in with the coal (or heave the bags in, I'm not sure as to the actual feed mechanism though I keep meaning to see if I can get a tour). I'm not actually in the program area, but I know where to drop my bags of plastic to get them into the program (one of the recycling companies in the area of the program handles it, and I'm over there often enough that I'll toss a few of the bags in the back of the car if I'm going that way).

kube-system 4y ago

Plastic recycling is simply not very practical in the current day. Solving that problem is certainly something we should strive for, but plastic isn't going anywhere any time soon. We need something to do with it today and the most environmentally friendly thing to do is to landfill it. If at some point in the future we have a good solution to recycle it, we'll know where to find it. But if we keep dumping it in the ocean we'll probably cause other disasters before we'd ever run out of empty space.

kwhitefoot 4y ago
> Plastic recycling is simply not very practical in the current day. Of course it is practical. Here in Norway we recycle about 30% of all plastic from domestic and industrial waste already. We have some way to go though, glass and metal is over 80%. Some plastic is especially well suited to re-use; for instance, we recycle 73% of PET used for drinks containers. See https://bellona.no/assets/Avfall-Rapport-5.pdf https://bellona.no/assets/Avfall-Rapport-5.pdf
- kube-system 4y ago
  Or in other words, even with only 5 million people’s plastic in a rich liberal western democracy, you still can’t manage to recycle the vast majority of your plastic. That 70% needs to go somewhere, and a landfill is the best place for it. Not an incinerator, a low income country, or the bottom of the ocean.
  - kwhitefoot 4y ago
    Or in yet other words, it takes time to change the habits of a thousand years. None of it goes to a low income country, and very little to the ocean. And our plastic waste per person is less than half of that of the US. Reducing plastic waste isn't merely a question of recycling, one must decide which plastics to allow for which purposes so that recycling can be effective. But not using it in the first place is the most effective. And lastly what does the population of the country have to do with the problem? I this mentioned over and over again in various contexts.

dr_dshiv 4y ago

Let’s think positively here, people. Clearly we just need to invent a straw that you can eat afterwards. Maybe it turns into chewing gum?

squam 4y ago

I don't disagree with anything you said. But as an individual, I can at least heed the advice to not attempt to recycle plastics if I'm not certain it won't ultimately end up in the ocean. The landfill is the lesser of two evils.