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Plastic doesn't recycle, at a practical scale. I like the idea of developing garbage burning plants with superb emission control, and burning it all locally.
by marze 4y ago
Plastic doesn't recycle, at a practical scale. I like the idea of developing garbage burning plants with superb emission control, and burning it all locally.
As well as reducing plastic usage in low value applications. It is sad, all the plastic litter in the world.
- stronglikedan 4y ago> Plastic doesn't recycle, at a practical scale. An waste industry buddy of mine designs landfills, and this is his take too. It's better to throw your plastic into regular trash (and other recyclables into the recycle bin), because then you at least know it's likely to end up in a landfill where it's safe, instead of being exported and dumped in the sea.
- BurningFrog 4y agoThe landfill is also functionally carbon sequestration.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoLandfills are a large source of GHG emissions, especially in the long term.
- LarryMullins 4y agoStable plastics probably don't account for much of that. The methane gas comes from food waste/etc rotting.
- mjevans 4y agoWhich is why it pains me so much that my municipality doesn't include (at least a household food scrap sized) compost bin with standard garbage service. They only offer a giant and expensive yard-waste bin.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoThat's why I mentioned long term, as you expand the time horizon you consider it over, landfill for plastics gets worse as it starts to decompose compared with incinerating with energy recovery or recycling.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoDefine long-term? I think that, as you expand the time horizon, you'll first reach the point at which the landfill gets buried, effectively sequestering the plastics and the carbon within.
- antisthenes 4y agoMost modern landfills have power stations that burn off these gases for electricity or heat for local consumption. The ones that don't can be GHG emitters, but that just means there are less emissions somewhere else (where trash was collected from), because you just concentrated a bunch of matter in one place. It's not a significant net emitter.
- convivialdingo 4y agoWaste-to-energy plants have been utilized for a couple of decades in Sweden. There's several new plants in the USA. I think it's more likely that regulated and aggregated pollution management will be at least somewhat successful. These plants will buy up vast sums of waste that would otherwise often get into the environment and oceans. Honestly with good air scrubbing it could replace many of our coal plants with better air quality outcomes.
- iforgotpassword 4y agoHN is busy telling me over and over again that power from coal and natural gas is dirty and cannot feasibly be filtered to be clean, so the only way to go is nuclear, which doesn't have any problems at all. How come we can burn plastic of all things in a clean way?
- selectodude 4y agoWe can’t. But plastic has very few good replacements. Coal and natgas have excellent replacements.
- govg 4y agoAs the other person points out, with power there are alternatives that are basically 1:1 (electricity is fungible for the most part). With plastic, we do not have readily available replacements for every kind out there, and if we burn them in controlled, concentrated points, then (hopefully) we can scrub and filter the air at the point of emissions.
- malfist 4y agoYour comment has excessive hyperbole and isn't constructive to discourse. Even pro nuclear folks will recognize that it has drawbacks and needs to be managed carefully. They believe that those drawbacks are less than that of fossil fuels and that nuclear can be ramped up faster than renewables.