6 ms·

I genuinely use landfills, especially with plastic waste, as shibboleth to know whether I'm talking to somebody who is an environmentalist or somebody who is an

by scoofy 2y ago

I genuinely use landfills, especially with plastic waste, as shibboleth to know whether I'm talking to somebody who is an environmentalist or somebody who is an "environmentalist." Anyone who thinks recycling plastic is some sort of normative good because "waste is bad" clearly hasn't put any thought into what environmental issues need to be focused on right now.

toomuchtodo 2y ago
How do you feel about plasma gasification to ensure robust destruction of anything non-inert? I love landfills too! But humans are various shades of tricky, lazy, cost adverse, and untrustworthy (think limited liability) as it pertains to long term custodianship and management of things bad for people and the environment. TLDR You must engineer around the human. Potentially harmful physical matter that requires waste management? Default to destruction vs storage, if at all possible. You have now defaulted to success instead of failure. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38994374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38994374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722984 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
- cogman10 2y ago
  The big problem with plastic waste is getting it to the landfill (or incinerator) in the first place. Once the plastics are captured, I don't see too much benefit in incinerating it beyond freeing up landfill space. But that's really not a major issue as you can always dig a deeper and wider landfill. In fact, a major downside of incinerating the plastic is you end up with greenhouse gasses as a byproduct.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    Certainly, you are generating some greenhouse gasses in the process, which is a trade off to ensure immediate waste destruction. To note, you will have to flare methane from the landfill in perpetuity when landfilled. If one is so inclined, internalize the cost of direct air carbon capture into the cost of waste disposal for those emissions. https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-gas https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-ga... > Municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States, accounting for approximately 14.4 percent of these emissions in 2022. The methane emissions from MSW landfills in 2022 were approximately equivalent to the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from more than 24.0 million gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for one year or the CO2 emissions from more than 13.1 million homes’ energy use for one year. At the same time, methane emissions from MSW landfills represent a lost opportunity to capture and use a significant energy resource. TLDR Whether landfills or gasification, you are paying the piper regardless for emissions. Don't trust the human, pull forward the disposal.
    - cogman10 2y ago
      Point taken. Though I do wonder how much of the methane released is from plastic decomposition and how much of it is from food/biomaterial decomposition. I'd naively assume the primary emission would come from readily decomposable materials and that most plastics would remain fairly stable for a lot longer than yesterday's half eaten hamburger.
      - toomuchtodo 2y ago
        Indeed, waste sorting might improve the situation, but all available evidence indicates there is no will to do this (caveats being parts of Europe, Japan, the Nordics, and anywhere else diverse multi stream waste management can be effectively operated), which leads me to believe gasification is the superior path (with a bypass stream for glass, brick, earth, rock, and metals, primarily to prevent process efficiency reduction during gasification but also for reuse of those materials). Hardly the best solution, but I argue the least worst solution. Landfilling is just too much risk considering leaching from lining failures (putting water tables and aquifers at risk from permanent contamination) and the lifetime of methane destruction that must be accounted for.
        CRConrad 2y ago
        You're repeating yourself: > parts of Europe, Japan, the Nordics The Nordics are a part of Europe. DRY! :-)
        ianburrell 2y ago
        What has been successful in my city, Portland, is separating the food and yard waste. The food and yard wastes are composted. Composting produces methane, but there is a trial to capture the methane which is burned as natural gas. Capturing methane from compost should be easier than whole landfill. It also keeps the organics instead of losing them.
        eru 2y ago
        You don't really lose anything in a landfill. You just lock it up for a while. We can 'mine' landfills in the future, if that becomes economically viable.
  - eru 2y ago
    > But that's really not a major issue as you can always dig a deeper and wider landfill. The submission suggests that landfills ain't dug, but just piled high. Digging a hole costs more time, money and effort than not digging a hole.
- pstuart 2y ago
  Not OP but long been intrigued by possibilities in this domain (ever since Changing World Technologies promised to, um, change the world -- not plasma based but same proposition). I've yet to see a truly viable solution in this space that can economically compete; it would be nice to see it happen.
Mistletoe 2y ago
It was so frustrating when a dude at work was trying to bust my balls for not using the recycling for my plastic bottle. I didn’t have the energy or patience to explain to him how our city has single stream recycling and there was 100% chance that bottle was being shipped overseas, dumped in the ocean or something else way more stupid than just being buried in the city landfill.
- gregmac 2y ago
  I worked in an office with recycling bins where everything was just gathered up and thrown in the dumpster with the rest of the garbage. It wasn't just our cleaning people, either: from my desk I could see the only two parking lot entrances and while the garbage truck came weekly, never once did I see a recycling truck.
  - wahnfrieden 2y ago
    likewise at a large office building I'm familiar with it was said that because employees/building tenants contaminate the recycling bins with unrecyclable items including food waste, there was no point to do anything but combine it into the trash however the recycling bins were kept presumably to keep people from protesting about trashing everything, and the memory of this news quickly faded the same goes for recycling bins in downtown toronto - they're so contaminated that they go straight to landfill
  - raisedbyninjas 2y ago
    PepsiCo did the same thing. Custodians dumped everything into the same bags. Leadership confirmed it all went to the dump. Still had a personal recycle bin crammed under every desk.
    - ARandomerDude 2y ago
      This is just corporate virtue signaling.
      - 2y ago
mschuster91 2y ago
> Anyone who thinks recycling plastic is some sort of normative good because "waste is bad" clearly hasn't put any thought into what environmental issues need to be focused on right now. Thing is, we need to find out ways to remove, reduce and recycle plastics as soon as possible. The US may have enough place to place landfills without impacting anyone, but densely settled Europe does not - we're having the requirement that landfills can only take up 10% of residential waste by 2035, the rest has to be either burned or recycled by then. And for that, we need technology to actually recycle the plastic waste to be ready at industrial scale, so we need to focus on that right now. Sorting trash, separating modern multi layer plastics (sometimes a dozen layers of different materials!), recovering polymer source compounds, a lot of that is still open topics that need to be researched. Additionally, landfills are already bad for the environment - Grady points out the issue in his video indirectly: the birds eat the food waste from all the packaging and end up distributing (micro)plastic waste across the environment surrounding the landfills, which then ends up in the groundwater and surface water bodies. Also the birds pick up and distribute pathogens from the decomposing waste. Side note: we also need plastics recycling to reduce our dependency on fresh oil products used to manufacture them. Again, the US has it a bit easier due to self-sufficient domestic oil production, but Europe does not. [1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/pdfs/news/expert/2018/4/story/20180328STO00751/20180328STO00751_de.pdf https://www.europarl.europa.eu/pdfs/news/expert/2018/4/story...
- bluGill 2y ago
  Europe is not densely populated. There is plenty of empty space, they just have decided to place rules on how that space is used. The US east of the Mississippi and the far west coast has similar (lower, but not by much) population density. However there is a lot of space in Alaska and west of the Mississippi that almost nobody lives in and that brings down the density measures.
acec 2y ago
Waste is inherently problematic, regardless of how we manage it. While burning plastic for energy might seem like a solution, it's not ideal. We can generate clean electricity through other means that are cheaper and less polluting. Burning waste still releases harmful toxins into the environment and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions – even if it reduces landfill methane, which is a potent contributor to climate change. Ultimately, the best approach is to minimize waste generation in the first place, as this prevents both environmental harm and the need for costly and imperfect solutions.
- Sammi 2y ago
  It does seem like we are producing an unnecessarily large amount of waste, but the last sentence does not come of as constructive to me, because it doesn't offer any concrete action we can take towards a goal of reducing waste. Instead if comes of as sidestepping the issue of dealing with the waste we have.
  - ArnoVW 2y ago
    That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it, is that your vision is not constructive, because you wave away the real solution as "not actionable". Parent does not propose concrete action, but neither do you. We can have meaningful discussion without everything having to be accompanied by a five-step plan. For actionable reduction of waste, just look at how Europe has a comparable life style as the US, whilst using less resources and emitting less GHG equivalent. Not placing the EU on a pedestal. Just saying that reduction is not just possible, it's being done, as we speak. But it requires changes and is for sure a harder sell than "no need to change any habits, technology will save us".
    - lillecarl 2y ago
      Many if not all "large" (50k) cities in Sweden burn their trash for district heating, we filter most bad stuff out with filters, it still releases CO2, but burning it means it won't start producing methane, which is a worse greenhouse gas. Europe also doesn't tax "light trucks" as if they were bicycles nor force people into cars to survive. The American mindset "I do what I do and you do what you do" worked in the 60s and 70s when people were unaware they're fucking the planet (as hard as they are), but I can't help but look down on wasteful people, they're subsidized by people doing their part (or continents doing their part)
throwaway2037 2y ago
Is recycling plastic bad? What environmental issues need to be focused on right now?
- foobarbaz33 2y ago
  Much plastic recycling is a sham. 1st world business pays 3rd world business to take their plastic for "recycling" (mandatory air quotes). The 1st world gets credit for being a responsible environmentalist. The 3rd world business then dumps the plastic in a river or other convenient but totally not enviro-friendly dumping spot. It's sort of an open conspiracy at this point. Putting your plastic in the trash may be better for the environment overall.
  - lmpdev 2y ago
    To self-checkout at my local grocery store, I have to clear a reminder that any soft plastic recycled through the store over the last x years was in fact not recycled and stockpiled around Australia in warehouses “waiting” for it to become economically feasible (it never did) REDcycle (effectively Australia’s lone large-scale soft plastic recycling effort) folded and it was a big brouhaha Source: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/jan/30/redcycles-collapse-and-the-hard-truths-on-recycling-soft-plastics-in-australia https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/jan/30/redcy...
- jl6 2y ago
  “Recycling” sometimes (often) includes burning it in waste-to-energy incinerators, which emit CO2 and other pollutants just as if the original oil had been burned directly instead of taking a detour via a plastic product. It would be better to put waste plastic in a carbon storage device, a.k.a. a landfill. At least that way we are caching a little bit of easy-access fuel to help re-bootstrap civilization in case of global catastrophe.
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
Ironically, just from this comment I get the impression that you are misinformed about environmental issues. Good job taking down that "waste is bad" straw person. But what about the EU or the EPAs (or a range of other relevant institutions) waste management hierarchy? It would appear you've just placed almost the entire waste management industry, its regulators, and related academia in the "don't know what they are talking about" pile, which seems somewhat bold.

by scoofy 2y ago

toomuchtodo 2y ago

How do you feel about plasma gasification to ensure robust destruction of anything non-inert? I love landfills too! But humans are various shades of tricky, lazy, cost adverse, and untrustworthy (think limited liability) as it pertains to long term custodianship and management of things bad for people and the environment. TLDR You must engineer around the human. Potentially harmful physical matter that requires waste management? Default to destruction vs storage, if at all possible. You have now defaulted to success instead of failure. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38994374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38994374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722984 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification

cogman10 2y ago
The big problem with plastic waste is getting it to the landfill (or incinerator) in the first place. Once the plastics are captured, I don't see too much benefit in incinerating it beyond freeing up landfill space. But that's really not a major issue as you can always dig a deeper and wider landfill. In fact, a major downside of incinerating the plastic is you end up with greenhouse gasses as a byproduct.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Certainly, you are generating some greenhouse gasses in the process, which is a trade off to ensure immediate waste destruction. To note, you will have to flare methane from the landfill in perpetuity when landfilled. If one is so inclined, internalize the cost of direct air carbon capture into the cost of waste disposal for those emissions. https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-gas https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-ga... > Municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States, accounting for approximately 14.4 percent of these emissions in 2022. The methane emissions from MSW landfills in 2022 were approximately equivalent to the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from more than 24.0 million gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for one year or the CO2 emissions from more than 13.1 million homes’ energy use for one year. At the same time, methane emissions from MSW landfills represent a lost opportunity to capture and use a significant energy resource. TLDR Whether landfills or gasification, you are paying the piper regardless for emissions. Don't trust the human, pull forward the disposal.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    Point taken. Though I do wonder how much of the methane released is from plastic decomposition and how much of it is from food/biomaterial decomposition. I'd naively assume the primary emission would come from readily decomposable materials and that most plastics would remain fairly stable for a lot longer than yesterday's half eaten hamburger.
    - toomuchtodo 2y ago
      Indeed, waste sorting might improve the situation, but all available evidence indicates there is no will to do this (caveats being parts of Europe, Japan, the Nordics, and anywhere else diverse multi stream waste management can be effectively operated), which leads me to believe gasification is the superior path (with a bypass stream for glass, brick, earth, rock, and metals, primarily to prevent process efficiency reduction during gasification but also for reuse of those materials). Hardly the best solution, but I argue the least worst solution. Landfilling is just too much risk considering leaching from lining failures (putting water tables and aquifers at risk from permanent contamination) and the lifetime of methane destruction that must be accounted for.
      - CRConrad 2y ago
        You're repeating yourself: > parts of Europe, Japan, the Nordics The Nordics are a part of Europe. DRY! :-)
      - ianburrell 2y ago
        What has been successful in my city, Portland, is separating the food and yard waste. The food and yard wastes are composted. Composting produces methane, but there is a trial to capture the methane which is burned as natural gas. Capturing methane from compost should be easier than whole landfill. It also keeps the organics instead of losing them.
        eru 2y ago
        You don't really lose anything in a landfill. You just lock it up for a while. We can 'mine' landfills in the future, if that becomes economically viable.
- eru 2y ago
  > But that's really not a major issue as you can always dig a deeper and wider landfill. The submission suggests that landfills ain't dug, but just piled high. Digging a hole costs more time, money and effort than not digging a hole.
pstuart 2y ago
Not OP but long been intrigued by possibilities in this domain (ever since Changing World Technologies promised to, um, change the world -- not plasma based but same proposition). I've yet to see a truly viable solution in this space that can economically compete; it would be nice to see it happen.

Mistletoe 2y ago

It was so frustrating when a dude at work was trying to bust my balls for not using the recycling for my plastic bottle. I didn’t have the energy or patience to explain to him how our city has single stream recycling and there was 100% chance that bottle was being shipped overseas, dumped in the ocean or something else way more stupid than just being buried in the city landfill.

gregmac 2y ago
I worked in an office with recycling bins where everything was just gathered up and thrown in the dumpster with the rest of the garbage. It wasn't just our cleaning people, either: from my desk I could see the only two parking lot entrances and while the garbage truck came weekly, never once did I see a recycling truck.
- wahnfrieden 2y ago
  likewise at a large office building I'm familiar with it was said that because employees/building tenants contaminate the recycling bins with unrecyclable items including food waste, there was no point to do anything but combine it into the trash however the recycling bins were kept presumably to keep people from protesting about trashing everything, and the memory of this news quickly faded the same goes for recycling bins in downtown toronto - they're so contaminated that they go straight to landfill
- raisedbyninjas 2y ago
  PepsiCo did the same thing. Custodians dumped everything into the same bags. Leadership confirmed it all went to the dump. Still had a personal recycle bin crammed under every desk.
  - ARandomerDude 2y ago
    This is just corporate virtue signaling.
    - 2y ago

mschuster91 2y ago

> Anyone who thinks recycling plastic is some sort of normative good because "waste is bad" clearly hasn't put any thought into what environmental issues need to be focused on right now. Thing is, we need to find out ways to remove, reduce and recycle plastics as soon as possible. The US may have enough place to place landfills without impacting anyone, but densely settled Europe does not - we're having the requirement that landfills can only take up 10% of residential waste by 2035, the rest has to be either burned or recycled by then. And for that, we need technology to actually recycle the plastic waste to be ready at industrial scale, so we need to focus on that right now. Sorting trash, separating modern multi layer plastics (sometimes a dozen layers of different materials!), recovering polymer source compounds, a lot of that is still open topics that need to be researched. Additionally, landfills are already bad for the environment - Grady points out the issue in his video indirectly: the birds eat the food waste from all the packaging and end up distributing (micro)plastic waste across the environment surrounding the landfills, which then ends up in the groundwater and surface water bodies. Also the birds pick up and distribute pathogens from the decomposing waste. Side note: we also need plastics recycling to reduce our dependency on fresh oil products used to manufacture them. Again, the US has it a bit easier due to self-sufficient domestic oil production, but Europe does not. [1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/pdfs/news/expert/2018/4/story/20180328STO00751/20180328STO00751_de.pdf https://www.europarl.europa.eu/pdfs/news/expert/2018/4/story...

bluGill 2y ago
Europe is not densely populated. There is plenty of empty space, they just have decided to place rules on how that space is used. The US east of the Mississippi and the far west coast has similar (lower, but not by much) population density. However there is a lot of space in Alaska and west of the Mississippi that almost nobody lives in and that brings down the density measures.

acec 2y ago

Waste is inherently problematic, regardless of how we manage it. While burning plastic for energy might seem like a solution, it's not ideal. We can generate clean electricity through other means that are cheaper and less polluting. Burning waste still releases harmful toxins into the environment and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions – even if it reduces landfill methane, which is a potent contributor to climate change. Ultimately, the best approach is to minimize waste generation in the first place, as this prevents both environmental harm and the need for costly and imperfect solutions.

Sammi 2y ago
It does seem like we are producing an unnecessarily large amount of waste, but the last sentence does not come of as constructive to me, because it doesn't offer any concrete action we can take towards a goal of reducing waste. Instead if comes of as sidestepping the issue of dealing with the waste we have.
- ArnoVW 2y ago
  That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it, is that your vision is not constructive, because you wave away the real solution as "not actionable". Parent does not propose concrete action, but neither do you. We can have meaningful discussion without everything having to be accompanied by a five-step plan. For actionable reduction of waste, just look at how Europe has a comparable life style as the US, whilst using less resources and emitting less GHG equivalent. Not placing the EU on a pedestal. Just saying that reduction is not just possible, it's being done, as we speak. But it requires changes and is for sure a harder sell than "no need to change any habits, technology will save us".
  - lillecarl 2y ago
    Many if not all "large" (50k) cities in Sweden burn their trash for district heating, we filter most bad stuff out with filters, it still releases CO2, but burning it means it won't start producing methane, which is a worse greenhouse gas. Europe also doesn't tax "light trucks" as if they were bicycles nor force people into cars to survive. The American mindset "I do what I do and you do what you do" worked in the 60s and 70s when people were unaware they're fucking the planet (as hard as they are), but I can't help but look down on wasteful people, they're subsidized by people doing their part (or continents doing their part)

throwaway2037 2y ago

Is recycling plastic bad? What environmental issues need to be focused on right now?

foobarbaz33 2y ago
Much plastic recycling is a sham. 1st world business pays 3rd world business to take their plastic for "recycling" (mandatory air quotes). The 1st world gets credit for being a responsible environmentalist. The 3rd world business then dumps the plastic in a river or other convenient but totally not enviro-friendly dumping spot. It's sort of an open conspiracy at this point. Putting your plastic in the trash may be better for the environment overall.
- lmpdev 2y ago
  To self-checkout at my local grocery store, I have to clear a reminder that any soft plastic recycled through the store over the last x years was in fact not recycled and stockpiled around Australia in warehouses “waiting” for it to become economically feasible (it never did) REDcycle (effectively Australia’s lone large-scale soft plastic recycling effort) folded and it was a big brouhaha Source: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/jan/30/redcycles-collapse-and-the-hard-truths-on-recycling-soft-plastics-in-australia https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/jan/30/redcy...
jl6 2y ago
“Recycling” sometimes (often) includes burning it in waste-to-energy incinerators, which emit CO2 and other pollutants just as if the original oil had been burned directly instead of taking a detour via a plastic product. It would be better to put waste plastic in a carbon storage device, a.k.a. a landfill. At least that way we are caching a little bit of easy-access fuel to help re-bootstrap civilization in case of global catastrophe.

ZeroGravitas 2y ago

Ironically, just from this comment I get the impression that you are misinformed about environmental issues. Good job taking down that "waste is bad" straw person. But what about the EU or the EPAs (or a range of other relevant institutions) waste management hierarchy? It would appear you've just placed almost the entire waste management industry, its regulators, and related academia in the "don't know what they are talking about" pile, which seems somewhat bold.