3 ms·
Landfilling plastic is fine. The problem is introducing disposable plastic to places without adequate waste management. If people are just going to throw their
by megaman821 1y ago
Landfilling plastic is fine. The problem is introducing disposable plastic to places without adequate waste management. If people are just going to throw their empty containers into the river, paper will quickly degrade and glass will sink to the bottom and eventually be crushed back into sand. Metals are usually valuable enough that they are collected for recycling, even in coutries without great waste management.
- yusina 1y agoThe vast majority of landfills eventually leak. It's overall a terrible way to handle this waste w.r.t. environmental impact.
- megaman821 1y agoRemoving all plastic from landfills wouldn't really change anything. Landfills are already lined to prevent leaking for decades and then there are monitoring systems for heavy metals and other harmful chemicals anyway.
- legulere 1y agoRemoving plastics from landfills would decease the sizes of landfills and thus costs to keep them up or to instead incinerate the waste. Decades aren't enough, as plastics basically don't decompose fully at all. Landfills are basically a high interest loan, to not have to pay for dealing with the trash today.
- legulere 1y agoFor recycling one of the hardest problems is separating plastics out from the rest. The rest is causing issues in landfills: landfill gas containing methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, leachates contaminating groundwater. If you have the plastics already sorted out recycling them makes more sense even on the short term. It's also very easy to underestimate the costs of landfilling, because you have to keep them up basically forever. Having one person look after it for ten thousand years is higher than having ten thousand people look after it for one year, because wages rise faster than inflation.