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Comment by mjfern | Hacker News Reader

This photo is surreal. I can't believe a trash filled planet is becoming a reality and we are doing little to nothing to stop it.

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Human nature being what it is, it's inevitable. Making it about personal responsibility to recycle and dispose tidily is guaranteeing a tragedy of the commons. This frees manufacturers to create ever more packaging crap and chase an extra fraction of a cent.

Only way to stop it is to go back to packaging that decomposes or is inert like glass which soon loses the sharp edges.

We need to get back to paper/cardboard packaging. Trees can be and are farmed. You can use as much paper as you want and never run out of trees.

Also makes it a natural carbon sink (trees->paper packaging->landfills).

Isn't the paper decomposing in the landfill still part of the carbon cycle? Landfills break down, shrink, venting gases back into the atmosphere.

Yes, but at a reduced rate. And the methane at landfills is either burned off or used to generate electricity.

> And the methane at landfills is either burned off or used to generate electricity.

There's a retired landfill not far from my childhood home which was covered with grass and the area turned into a park. It had vent pipes dotting the large hill colloquially referred to as "mount trashmore", but nothing else was done to manage the vented gases.

Perhaps you meant "may be", rather than "is". Especially if we're talking about landfill practices across the globe.

As with everything, it’s nuanced. The EPA regulations requiring methane management are fairly recent, although some waste management orgs have been more progressive than others historically (and there’s money to be made in piping or burning that methane).

With that said, it’s entirely possible there are older landfills that are simply exhausting methane into the atmosphere. I expect their numbers to fall over time, as the EPA has a substantial budget (~$100MM) for landfill custodians who would like to remediate their methane disposal.

https://www.epa.gov/lmop

According to their fact sheet, the majority of active and recently close landfills aren't collecting methane.

It also implies that a modest majority of landfills where collection is economically viable are collecting, but there's apparently ~1400 landfills where it isn't gonna happen.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-08/documents...

No we do not. We need to do this instead:

1. Reduce 2. Re-use 3. Recycle

In that order.

Stop making crap that breaks. Stop buying crap we don't need.

Please, the Western world is doing a lot of work in keeping it out of water ways and oceans. The majority of trash is from China and other Asian countries. [1]

What can we do? Simple, this is where trade requirements include treating the environment right. We already have restrictions on seafood harvesting and protecting certain species like whales and dolphins. no reason we cannot hold trade to require proper handling of waste and pollution to include penalties and fees on offending nations

[1] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-01-13/5-countries-dump-more...

To be fair, part of the way we "take care" of it is by shipping a bunch of it's trash to China [0].

[0] https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/why-china-isnt-taking-amer...

I mean, true in the most technical sense, but given the Chinese paid an estimated half billion dollars for it in 2016 [1], the implication that it's being dumped there is disingenuous.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-bans-foreig...

I think you are misleading yourself by recycling policies and waste management that takes the trash out to a place where you cannot see it, precisely the point of the article. The amount of trash a person generates in a country like the US is astounding. One person in the US generates in average 4.4 pounds of trash every day, and that makes Americans the top polluters in this sense.

Having lived in North America, South America and China, I can tell you the main difference is packaging. The trash can itself is huge in the US, while in South America people use something closer to a small paper bin. A lot of the trash is organic, but in general, waste management and wastewater treatment in Latin America is awful.

China on the other hand has a big wastewater treatment problem, especially in provinces like Sichuan from what I saw. One village I visited had its main creek contaminated in our generation by a nearby factory. waste generation is also low over there.

https://www.treehugger.com/environmental-policy/trash-number...

For this reason I'm kinda glad stuff like this is happening, it will be a clear reminder of what we're doing to the planet. Kinda like when our rivers caught on fire in the 70s.

It's unfortunate that it's happening to someone, but people need visual reminders that there's a problem.

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