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Backfired? > While recycling campaigns can help limit what heads to the landfill Oh, backfired in the US. Gotcha. Right. And because it didn't work out in the

Backfired? > While recycling campaigns can help limit what heads to the landfill Oh, backfired in the US. Gotcha. Right. And because it didn't work out in the US, there's absolutely no way that any other country could have this shit figured out, right? Landfills. Jesus.

vore 3y ago
Is incineration really that much better? You’re trading off one kind of pollution for another: toxic emissions and toxic byproducts that still have to be disposed of in some way… One way or another, countries have to deal with non-recyclable, non-compostable waste, and all solutions to it are pretty nasty.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  You get toxic ash for a landfill, if you have a proper smoke treatment, but you could argue that the waste was already toxic before the burning and far less so now since many toxins are destroyed in fire. Also the volume is smaller for the ash.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    The thing is, with incineration you also lose all the raw materials and the energy contained within them, as well as release all the CO2 and other greenhouse gases - not a good thing given that most of the stuff ending up in incinerators is fossil in origin. Landfills at least can be mined in the future when we develop at-scale actual recycling capabilities for plastics (e.g. GMO bacteria/fungi that break down the polymers in the waste into precursors that can be used to create new plastics).
    - uoaei 3y ago
      The thing is, virtually every single incineration plant also generates electricity, typically at smaller scales than dedicated plants to serve smaller regions, but distributed/decentralized generation is a big win for resilience of the grid overall. Also please provide at least one citation where "maybe we'll totally reverse the negative effects of this thing we put into our environment" has been fulfilled. I can only think of failures to live up to that expectation: PFAS, microplastics, oil spills, etc.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      You want to separate e.g. iron from the trash before burning. I even think you can separate aluminum. Plastic is not a raw material really. It is probably better to burn it instead of doing landfills with it waiting for some miracle bacteria. We could use paper and cardboard for most plastic packaging and many uses of plastic packaging is useless, like those hard plastics around scissors or whatever in the store.
      - mschuster91 3y ago
        > It is probably better to burn it instead of doing landfills with it waiting for some miracle bacteria. Still releases fossil-origin CO2, we can't afford that for global warming reasons. In a landfill the CO2 remains trapped. Agree on your reduction point, that is long overdue but will only happen with significant governmental regulations.
        henrikschroder 3y ago
        > In a landfill the CO2 remains trapped. Some, yes, but not all.
        mschuster91 3y ago
        Plastics take decades centuries to degrade, and most of that degradation is physical - it gets degraded to microplastics. As soon as it's in a landfill where it's not in motion or exposed to sunlight, it's essentially conserved for human lifetime cycles.
        smileysteve 3y ago
        Until too much water makes it into the landfill, creates an acid with other mixed materials (like cardboard glues, household cleaners) and then leaches the acids and plastic and heavy metal into the aquifer. Most landfills near me with liners made in the last 30 years have acid problems and liner breaches
        rightbyte 3y ago
- defrost 3y ago
  The primary researchers had a note on this: we found that people overlook waste reduction and reuse Consuming less and eschewing excessive over production is just crazy though, right?
  - vore 3y ago
    I’m rebutting the parent post that claims countries other than the US somehow have a better solution to landfilling for non-recyclable waste. Of course solving the root cause is the right thing to do, no argument from me!
    - defrost 3y ago
      I got that, all the same it seemed like as good a thread branch as any to emphasis that the OP research article really stresses an excess of waste as the primary issue before hitting the break down of how to deal with that. I might suggest that very likely the USofA has a mush higher "waste generated per capita" than many other counries .. and that a number of countries are having to deal with mountains of waste shipped onto their shores by the USofA (and a few other first world offenders). I have no argument with you, we seem to be on a similar page here :)
    - henrikschroder 3y ago
      > somehow The US has an absolutely enormous Not-Invented-Here field around pretty much any policy discussion. It is simply inconceivable for most Americans to look for solutions outside their own borders. The solution is called modern trash incineration plants.
- lrem 3y ago
  A boatload of waste containing an amount of toxins come in. At the price of using up filters, a truckload of ash containing a smaller amount of toxins comes out. And you get quite a bit of energy out of the process too. Sure, the energy you get out isn't worth as much as the materials and labour you put in. If that's a modern plant, you also recover metals from the waste - a roughly break-even process that allows you to recover material that was previously unrecyclable. The ash coming out at the end is orders of magnitude less voluminous than the input, uniform, powder and dry. The Internet claims this gets used in construction as bulk fill and road underlays, but I haven't seen any official materials about that. All in all the process is economically viable (especially when you have no cheap land to waste, but probably otherwise too, see the case of Sweden importing Italian trash) and seems strongly preferable ecologically.
  - fomine3 3y ago
    It is used in Japan but very few info in English https://www.tokyokankyo.jp/tokyoprogram/en/recycling-technologies/ash-melting/ https://www.tokyokankyo.jp/tokyoprogram/en/recycling-technol... https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%BA%B6%E8%9E%8D%E3%82%B9%E3%83%A9%E3%82%B0 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%BA%B6%E8%9E%8D%E3%82%B9%E3...
- henrikschroder 3y ago
  A million times yes. If you gather all your garbage, especially plastic garbage, and burn it, recovering heat and energy, you can offset a lot of oil- and gas-powered electricity generation. As an aside, it doesn't matter how many plastic straws and plastic bags you make, as long as you burn them after use. Landfills also emit greenhouse gases, uncontrolled, over a long period of time, so it's not so much of a trade-off as you think it is. Since 1990, Sweden has cut greenhouse gas emissions from trash to one fourth of what it was, and that's by moving from landfills to trash incineration: https://www.naturvardsverket.se/data-och-statistik/klimat/vaxthusgaser-utslapp-fran-avfall/ https://www.naturvardsverket.se/data-och-statistik/klimat/va... (Blue is greenhouse gases from landfills, dark blue is emissions from trash incinerators.)
- audunw 3y ago
  Of course incineration is better. Modern incineration plants are very effective at filtering out the nasty stuff. And it’s way easier to make sure a small quantity of very concentrated nasty stuff is never released into nature, than dispersed chemicals and heavy metals in a huge quantity of trash in a landfill. What’s more, we can use the energy for electricity and district heating. It’s very common in Northern Europe now. Copenhagen has one right in their city (with a ski slope on it) CO2 emissions should tend towards net zero as we move towards a future where we don’t dig up fossil hydrocarbons anymore. In the meantime, the trash power plants is mostly offsetting fossil fuel power plants anyway.
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> Landfills. Jesus. The US is a very lightly populated country.
- henrikschroder 3y ago
  Mine has an even lower population density and we still incinerate our trash instead of putting it on landfills. The environmental benefits are huge.
hnbad 3y ago
Did you read past that one sentence? It backfired in that the slogan is "reduce, reuse, recycle" and everyone just skips 1 and 2 and thinks recycling is magic and calls it a day. Which of course has more to do with there not being much profit in the first two but it's relatively easy to cash in on making your product "recyclable" or using "recycled materials" and making the consumers think that this means they're basically resource neutral. You can't buy an Amazon Echo product without Amazon telling you how they're so green it would almost be worse for the climate not to buy them (yes, that's an exaggeration but the messaging is pretty aggressive). Heck, the first two parts of the slogan literally mean "don't buy new things" (reduce = don't buy more, reuse = use what you already have).

vore 3y ago

Is incineration really that much better? You’re trading off one kind of pollution for another: toxic emissions and toxic byproducts that still have to be disposed of in some way… One way or another, countries have to deal with non-recyclable, non-compostable waste, and all solutions to it are pretty nasty.

rightbyte 3y ago
You get toxic ash for a landfill, if you have a proper smoke treatment, but you could argue that the waste was already toxic before the burning and far less so now since many toxins are destroyed in fire. Also the volume is smaller for the ash.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  The thing is, with incineration you also lose all the raw materials and the energy contained within them, as well as release all the CO2 and other greenhouse gases - not a good thing given that most of the stuff ending up in incinerators is fossil in origin. Landfills at least can be mined in the future when we develop at-scale actual recycling capabilities for plastics (e.g. GMO bacteria/fungi that break down the polymers in the waste into precursors that can be used to create new plastics).
  - uoaei 3y ago
    The thing is, virtually every single incineration plant also generates electricity, typically at smaller scales than dedicated plants to serve smaller regions, but distributed/decentralized generation is a big win for resilience of the grid overall. Also please provide at least one citation where "maybe we'll totally reverse the negative effects of this thing we put into our environment" has been fulfilled. I can only think of failures to live up to that expectation: PFAS, microplastics, oil spills, etc.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    You want to separate e.g. iron from the trash before burning. I even think you can separate aluminum. Plastic is not a raw material really. It is probably better to burn it instead of doing landfills with it waiting for some miracle bacteria. We could use paper and cardboard for most plastic packaging and many uses of plastic packaging is useless, like those hard plastics around scissors or whatever in the store.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      > It is probably better to burn it instead of doing landfills with it waiting for some miracle bacteria. Still releases fossil-origin CO2, we can't afford that for global warming reasons. In a landfill the CO2 remains trapped. Agree on your reduction point, that is long overdue but will only happen with significant governmental regulations.
      - henrikschroder 3y ago
        > In a landfill the CO2 remains trapped. Some, yes, but not all.
        mschuster91 3y ago
        Plastics take decades centuries to degrade, and most of that degradation is physical - it gets degraded to microplastics. As soon as it's in a landfill where it's not in motion or exposed to sunlight, it's essentially conserved for human lifetime cycles.
        smileysteve 3y ago
        Until too much water makes it into the landfill, creates an acid with other mixed materials (like cardboard glues, household cleaners) and then leaches the acids and plastic and heavy metal into the aquifer. Most landfills near me with liners made in the last 30 years have acid problems and liner breaches
      - rightbyte 3y ago
defrost 3y ago
The primary researchers had a note on this: we found that people overlook waste reduction and reuse Consuming less and eschewing excessive over production is just crazy though, right?
- vore 3y ago
  I’m rebutting the parent post that claims countries other than the US somehow have a better solution to landfilling for non-recyclable waste. Of course solving the root cause is the right thing to do, no argument from me!
  - defrost 3y ago
    I got that, all the same it seemed like as good a thread branch as any to emphasis that the OP research article really stresses an excess of waste as the primary issue before hitting the break down of how to deal with that. I might suggest that very likely the USofA has a mush higher "waste generated per capita" than many other counries .. and that a number of countries are having to deal with mountains of waste shipped onto their shores by the USofA (and a few other first world offenders). I have no argument with you, we seem to be on a similar page here :)
  - henrikschroder 3y ago
    > somehow The US has an absolutely enormous Not-Invented-Here field around pretty much any policy discussion. It is simply inconceivable for most Americans to look for solutions outside their own borders. The solution is called modern trash incineration plants.
lrem 3y ago
A boatload of waste containing an amount of toxins come in. At the price of using up filters, a truckload of ash containing a smaller amount of toxins comes out. And you get quite a bit of energy out of the process too. Sure, the energy you get out isn't worth as much as the materials and labour you put in. If that's a modern plant, you also recover metals from the waste - a roughly break-even process that allows you to recover material that was previously unrecyclable. The ash coming out at the end is orders of magnitude less voluminous than the input, uniform, powder and dry. The Internet claims this gets used in construction as bulk fill and road underlays, but I haven't seen any official materials about that. All in all the process is economically viable (especially when you have no cheap land to waste, but probably otherwise too, see the case of Sweden importing Italian trash) and seems strongly preferable ecologically.
- fomine3 3y ago
  It is used in Japan but very few info in English https://www.tokyokankyo.jp/tokyoprogram/en/recycling-technologies/ash-melting/ https://www.tokyokankyo.jp/tokyoprogram/en/recycling-technol... https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%BA%B6%E8%9E%8D%E3%82%B9%E3%83%A9%E3%82%B0 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%BA%B6%E8%9E%8D%E3%82%B9%E3...
henrikschroder 3y ago
A million times yes. If you gather all your garbage, especially plastic garbage, and burn it, recovering heat and energy, you can offset a lot of oil- and gas-powered electricity generation. As an aside, it doesn't matter how many plastic straws and plastic bags you make, as long as you burn them after use. Landfills also emit greenhouse gases, uncontrolled, over a long period of time, so it's not so much of a trade-off as you think it is. Since 1990, Sweden has cut greenhouse gas emissions from trash to one fourth of what it was, and that's by moving from landfills to trash incineration: https://www.naturvardsverket.se/data-och-statistik/klimat/vaxthusgaser-utslapp-fran-avfall/ https://www.naturvardsverket.se/data-och-statistik/klimat/va... (Blue is greenhouse gases from landfills, dark blue is emissions from trash incinerators.)
audunw 3y ago
Of course incineration is better. Modern incineration plants are very effective at filtering out the nasty stuff. And it’s way easier to make sure a small quantity of very concentrated nasty stuff is never released into nature, than dispersed chemicals and heavy metals in a huge quantity of trash in a landfill. What’s more, we can use the energy for electricity and district heating. It’s very common in Northern Europe now. Copenhagen has one right in their city (with a ski slope on it) CO2 emissions should tend towards net zero as we move towards a future where we don’t dig up fossil hydrocarbons anymore. In the meantime, the trash power plants is mostly offsetting fossil fuel power plants anyway.

thaumasiotes 3y ago

> Landfills. Jesus. The US is a very lightly populated country.

henrikschroder 3y ago
Mine has an even lower population density and we still incinerate our trash instead of putting it on landfills. The environmental benefits are huge.

hnbad 3y ago

Did you read past that one sentence? It backfired in that the slogan is "reduce, reuse, recycle" and everyone just skips 1 and 2 and thinks recycling is magic and calls it a day. Which of course has more to do with there not being much profit in the first two but it's relatively easy to cash in on making your product "recyclable" or using "recycled materials" and making the consumers think that this means they're basically resource neutral. You can't buy an Amazon Echo product without Amazon telling you how they're so green it would almost be worse for the climate not to buy them (yes, that's an exaggeration but the messaging is pretty aggressive). Heck, the first two parts of the slogan literally mean "don't buy new things" (reduce = don't buy more, reuse = use what you already have).