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Depends on what the waste products are and how they are captured, otherwise you trade one problem for another. The plastic takes up space but if it's in a landf
by not2b 4y ago
Depends on what the waste products are and how they are captured, otherwise you trade one problem for another. The plastic takes up space but if it's in a landfill you have carbon capture, best not to release that carbon into the air as CH4 or CO2.
- BurningFrog 4y agoYeah, landfills are not major environmental problems, AFAIK, but they offend the neat freak within all of us. And, as you say, they're pretty good carbon deposits, which is supposed to be The Most Important Thing.
- noja 4y ago> Yeah, landfills are not major environmental problems ... yet?
- xxr 4y agoIs there enough raw material on earth for landfills to become major environmental problems? (genuinely curious)
- BurningFrog 4y agoMaybe this makes me sounds like a jerk, but: All material that can end up in landfills is already on Earth.
- notahacker 4y agoDepends what you mean by "major environmental problem". Landfills aren't going to singlehandedly cause anthropogenic climate change, but they contribute significantly to it, and a poorly sealed landfill leaching its contents into the local water table can cause some pretty drastic problems with the local environment
- sacrosancty 4y agoHow are they worse than any alternative? If I dump my food waste in the garden, is that emitting less GHG than letting it decompose in a landfill? Is it that it comes out as methane from landfills but less harmful CO2 from a little pile? That should be solved by flaring the methane.
- google234123 4y agoIf you are worried about space i recommend that you look at the surface area of earth and the volume of space that’s accessible to us underneath the surface.
- DANK_YACHT 4y agoWhat would cause them to be an environmental issue? As far as I know they can be built in a safe manner and there is plenty of space for them.
- mschuster91 4y agoIn the Western world maybe, but outside of it... hell even in the Western world we have regular reports of mismanagement and corruption, just look at Italy. We need to reduce the amount of trash we produce, not hope for a miracle technology.
- DANK_YACHT 4y agoLandfills are not a miracle technology. They exist already and are technologically sound. It’d be way more of a miracle if we somehow managed to greatly reduce waste.
- paulryanrogers 4y agoHow sustainable are landfills? There's limited land for farming, residences, manufacturing, and everything else we use it for. And trucking trash to deserts to landfill there isn't carbon neutral either. Trash also doesn't breakdown as quickly in covered landfills (for better or worse depending on what one dumps).
- a9h74j 4y agoGiven the yield of useful content vs. rock in mining, I suspect the more limiting factor is space for all the mining, not space for disposal of the 0.1% metal etc yield for making industrial goods.
- stjohnswarts 4y agoPeople love to "what if" landfills. Best to not bother arguing with them. We have tons of problems with emissions, plastics pollution, industrial dumping. However landfills ain't one of them, but people won't give up. I've learned to not bother discussing anything with them if they don't know a few basics of how modern landfills are run (at least in western nations).
- snek_case 4y agoI think the main problem is that the average Joe/Jane confuses all types of pollution as equally bad. The real, most imminent threat is really CO2. That's what we have to spend the most money/energy on, because it could have absolutely catastrophic consequences in the next few decades. Plastic in a landfill is just... Stuck there. It's unnatural, sure, but it's not immensely harmful, not nearly on the same scale as CO2, and realistically, in the future, we'll be able to mine it out of there and refine it into something usable if we need it.
- therealdrag0 4y agoGarbage is also a problem in the environment like plastics in oceans, but the problem is not enough (well run and used) land fills (in Asia) not too many!
- RajT88 4y ago50% of the plastic problem in the ocean is discarded fishing nets (generally accepted to be discarded from Asian fishing vessels).
- justapassenger 4y agoSource?
- azertykeys 4y agolooks more like 10% [0]. but it depends on where in the ocean you're talking about - they float more easily than a lot of plastic, and so are caught the pacific gyre. [0] https://www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/publication/ghost-gear-the-abandoned-fishing-nets-haunting-our-oceans/ https://www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/publication/ghost-gear-t...
- doomrobo 4y agoA more accurate claim: 46% of the mass of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is fishing nets. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w
- drew-y 4y agoI wouldn't go that far. > Per the most recent Inventory Report, U.S. landfills released an estimated 109.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) of methane into the atmosphere in 2020; this represents 16.8 percent of the total U.S. anthropogenic methane emissions across all sectors. https://www.epa.gov/lmop/frequent-questions-about-landfill-gas#:~:text=Per%20the%20most%20recent%20Inventory,methane%20emissions%20across%20all%20sectors https://www.epa.gov/lmop/frequent-questions-about-landfill-g....
- Baeocystin 4y agoSure. That's almost all due to food waste, though. FWIW. https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/sustainable-management-food-basics https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/sustainable-...
- not2b 4y agoYes, for that reason Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley) is pushing hard to divert food waste out of the garbage and get it composted instead: it's supposed to go in with yard waste, not the regular trash. Not sure how successful this is as it counts on people putting things in the correct bin.
- nicoburns 4y agoHere in the UK you can actually be fined for putting food waste in the regular bin (although that depends on where you live and enforcement is spotty).
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y agoThere is a program like that in some suburbs of Sydney. We get little green bags for compostable waste. The up take has been ok from what I’ve seen but these are affluent suburbs.
- vondur 4y agoWe are now able to do this here in suburban Los Angeles. You can now put your food waste in the bin meant for green waste (lawn clippings)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- j-bos 4y agoOr those of us who don't like microplatics in our fish, water, and bodies
- stjohnswarts 4y agoThose microplastics aren't coming from landfills. They're coming from your everyday interactions with plastic and people dumping plastic in rivers and oceans.
- wanderr 4y agoMaybe not the landfills once they are buried. But certainly from waste transfer stations or unburied waste, seagulls and other birds will pick up trash because it smells like food or may have some food in it, and then drop it outside of the landfill/transfer station.
- munificent 4y agoIf you don't like microplastics, then you should be pro landfill. A very large fraction of those are from plastic waste in Asian countries that gets dumped into waterways instead of being landfilled.
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoWell, it's easy to say if you don't live near one. But if you do, the smell, view, and fact that ground water becomes undrinkable will convern you. Not to mention the space they take, where little life can live on. In the USA, you have a huge space, including deserts, so a landfill may be out of most human reach. But in France, landfills can't be far, and take the place of either a forest, or accomodations. We don't have a better way to deal with the huge amount of trash than landfills for now. But reducing the number or size of them would be a nice to have. I don't mean it should be a priority compared to most urging issues like climate change, but let's not get too comfy with it either.
- fritztastic 4y agoThe US sends millions of tons of trash to China, India, and other places. Perhaps it would be better for places to implement local sorting (glass, plastic, paper, etc.) and composting- as many other nations do as opposed to disposing of all trash in the same containers and shipping the problem off for someone else to deal with. But even better would be to generate less trash in the first place or at least have an attempt at transitioning to using biodegradable packaging. Packaging, which also is excessive and unecessary in the first place, like items in layers of plastic casing, plastic boxes, plastic wrapping, and so on when there are ways of distributing goods without convenient prepackaging in favor of instead refilling reusable containers or utilizing materials such as fabric, glass, or others which can be repurposed and reused more flexibly and reliably than plastic. Not even going to get into plastics being contaminated by toxic things and leeching chemicals. Landfills are not harmless to ecosystems and aquifers, either- they're a short term way of not dealing with the issue of waste materials, at best.
- lkbm 4y agoThe article talks about using it for environmental cleanup, but the paper seems more focused on recycling back into fresh PET[0]: > ...and a circular carbon economy for PET is theoretically attainable through rapid enzymatic depolymerization followed by repolymerization or conversion/valorization into other products > Finally, we demonstrate a closed-loop PET recycling process by using FAST-PETase and resynthesizing PET from the recovered monomers. Collectively, our results demonstrate a viable route for enzymatic plastic recycling at the industrial scale. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04599-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04599-z
- ncmncm 4y agoI used to think burying plastic in landfills for carbon sequestration was a good idea. Then I found out that making plastic releases an enormous amount of CO2. Thus, successful recycling of plastic would mean less new plastic being made, and less emission. Before renewables, petroleum not made into plastic would instead be burned as fuel. But now, or soon, maybe it will be left in the ground, instead, as not worth pumping out. It is better to leave carbon sequestered where it is than to extract and then sequester it.
- wyager 4y agoI would infinitely rather have a bit more gaseous carbon than a 10,000 year source of endocrine disruptor microplastics leaching into the water.
- flaviut 4y agoIt's a good thing we're all rich here, able to move to places with better climates or buy air conditioners, not the billions of poor people who have no way to survive intensifying extreme weather events.
- popcube 4y agoyes! American do not need worry about typhoon, so I can understand why there are so many people trust global warming can made environment "better"
- mrpopo 4y agoPlastic production worldwide is 300 million tons. I am not sure how this would convert to tons of CO2 as it burns (each carbon in the polymer chain associates with more oxygen in the air so it becomes heavier) but the world's CO2 emissions are 30 billion tons, so this would be in the order of 1 to 3% of the whole world's emissions. Not saying it's good, but burning plastic if it has environmental and health benefits is not out of question. Probably most of it is burned already (it definitely is in Asian countries).
- formerly_proven 4y ago> Probably most of it is burned already (it definitely is in Asian countries) Germany seems to have invented the term "thermal recycling", i.e. burning plastics. IIRC, it is actually considered a renewable energy source by the law. It's not the worst idea per se, if done right, and waste separation is actually significant here because it simplifies calorific value control.
- ohhhhhh 4y agohey did you know plants absorb c02