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Comment by henrikschroder | Hacker News Reader

I'm from a place where less than one percent of all household waste ends up in a landfill, so moving to the US and learning that most of my trash actually just goes on a dump somewhere was quite a shock to me. So why doesn't the US have more trash incinerators? It seems like such a no-brainer to me if you care about the environment?

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Is burning trash better* than a landfill? Honestly asking, I don't know and this is something I'd love to be better educated about. Seems like you'd have lots of toxic fumes from burning, which may make it less of a no-brainer.

* I don't know how to define "better".

A combination of high temperature, gas residence time, and various scrubbing technologies can more or less solve the toxic emissions problem from incinerators. On the other hand, landfills will emit huge amounts of methane for decades, and at this point relatively few landfills are equipped to collect this gas.

From a strictly air quality-focused perspective (my professional area), I would say incinerators are usually better. I would guess that incinerators are also preferable from a soil and water quality perspective, but I can't say for sure.

"Is burning trash better* than a landfill? Honestly asking"

I don't know a lot about this, but I do know that the nordic countries all incinerate their trash, and do so with scrubbers/filters that negate the pollution coming out of the incinerator.

Word on the street is that the nordic countries do everything better than we do and are the bright shining example for all things urban progressivism ... so ... I guess it's the right thing to be doing :)

It cannot be implemented everywhere. Sweden now needs to import trash to power its district heating, see e.g. http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/3/27/sweden-wants...

Your evidence it can't be implemented everywhere is a country that implemented so much if it that they can save money by importing trash?

"Everywhere" does not have the same need for heating during winter as Sweden does.

You can burn it cleanly, at sufficiently high temperatures. In the nordic countries, this heat is then going into city-wide central heating networks, meaning it substitutes natural gas or electricity for domestic heating.

> sufficiently high temperatures

Can you fuel such a fire with only the trash? Or do we need to supplement with other fossil fuels?

There's still going to be emissions though, right? What are the emissions? Just steam and CO2?

We have a lot of empty space and until very recently it was way worse for the environment to burn than bury.

Plasma gasification incinerators are quite clean.

Yes and it's quite new, huge amounts of waste have been (and continue to be) burned in much more dirty methods.

The US (and the world in general, really) has a lot of open land. We're in no danger of reaching "peak landfill" anytime soon, and if/when we do, it will probably be feasible and cheaper to lift and launch waste into the sun instead of trying to recycle it.

Regarding that last bit:

http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/shooting_for_the_sun/

Nice one, hadn't seen that particular article about the problem before. A hidden underlying detail in my comment is an assumption that such a waste crisis is so far in the future that we'll have things like space elevators (making getting to orbit easy) and solar sails (making reducing the starting earth-to-sun relative velocity doable in less than a year), though.

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