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Landfills, consumer recycling, composting, etc. are a dangerous distraction. We have hundreds to thousands of years to solve those problems before they are any

Landfills, consumer recycling, composting, etc. are a dangerous distraction. We have hundreds to thousands of years to solve those problems before they are any serious threat to our way of life and that of most other living things on this planet. We have no time left to solve global warming which is an immediate and critical threat to human civilization and potentially most life on Earth. Given the public's astonishing lack of attention to the environment, and the abject failure of our global leadership to care for us on on that front, we cannot afford to waste any of the limited attention on non-critical problems like landfills.

datenwolf 12y ago
The problems of waste management and global warming are closely interrelated though. First and foremost the more stuff goes into landfills, the more raw materials have to be mined and processed to replace it, which consumes a lot of energy and by that increases the greenhouse gases footprint. The main point of recycling is to avoid the greenhouse gases emissions that are associated with producing products from raw materials. A secondary problem with landfills is, especially if large amounts of compostable material go into them, that the biological degradation there happens mostly anaerobic, which in turn means it produces lots and lots of methane, which is a far more potent greenhouse gas. In a properly setup composting facility, be it small scale in your backyard, or industrial large scale the degradation happens aerobic, so that no methane is produced.
wdr1 12y ago
> we cannot afford to waste any of the limited attention on non-critical problems like landfills. As an environmental, this type of attitude is one of the things that concerns me most about the alarmist attitude on climate change. Climate change is an important problem we need to solve. It is not, however, the only problem.

datenwolf 12y ago

The problems of waste management and global warming are closely interrelated though. First and foremost the more stuff goes into landfills, the more raw materials have to be mined and processed to replace it, which consumes a lot of energy and by that increases the greenhouse gases footprint. The main point of recycling is to avoid the greenhouse gases emissions that are associated with producing products from raw materials. A secondary problem with landfills is, especially if large amounts of compostable material go into them, that the biological degradation there happens mostly anaerobic, which in turn means it produces lots and lots of methane, which is a far more potent greenhouse gas. In a properly setup composting facility, be it small scale in your backyard, or industrial large scale the degradation happens aerobic, so that no methane is produced.

wdr1 12y ago

> we cannot afford to waste any of the limited attention on non-critical problems like landfills. As an environmental, this type of attitude is one of the things that concerns me most about the alarmist attitude on climate change. Climate change is an important problem we need to solve. It is not, however, the only problem.