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Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

Disposal already costs; either you pay directly, through taxes if your local municipality organizes it, or your rent if your property owner organizes it.

The cost of disposal varies by where it is disposed, not where it is purchased or made. It makes no sense to add an arbitrary cost to a product when the receiver of that money is not the one dealing with the externality in the first place.

The same goes for carbon emissions; a properly managed landfill that captures released methane is in fact a method of carbon sequestration. Adding a carbon tax would merely create a new slush fund or dump into an existing one.

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Except that disposal costs are highly distorted - depending on where you are, it’s much cheaper than it should be because of cheap land for landfills, cheap shipping to shift the problem away, etc.

Proposals to add cost to disposal are meant to correct for these distortions - to really represent the collective cost to the world. This absolutely should not be done arbitrarily - massive, ongoing research should be done to ensure its correcting for these distortions appropriately. Rinse and repeat for fossil fuels.

BTW, a methane-capturing landfill is, at best, carbon neutral, not sequestering.

Depends what you burying, if it's paper and food waste, it is sequestering. Paper and food contain carbon pulled from the atmosphere, and by preventing it from decomposing by excluding oxygen (e.g most landfills) you get carbon sequestration

That causes anerobic composting which turns the carbon into methane. This is either recaptured and burned or goes into the atmosphere.

Only small amounts of the carbon are converted to methane... enough that capture is worthwhile, but there is certainly a significant portion remaining below ground.

I get the idea but I had learned it wasn’t an effective sequestration method. Do you have references I can check out?

My point was that the added cost should be reflected in the collection of waste, not the point of sale, because there aren't any externalities yet, and so there isn't anything to calculate.

As for landfills being cheap, that isn't a bad thing. That means the externalities at those sites are low. I live near an old one that was turned into a 50 acre prairie restoration space with about 2 miles of walking paths and full of wildlife. As others pointed out, burying carbon does sequester it. Methane capture merely prevents it from getting back out when it is nutrient and water dense (aka food waste).

1. There are tons of externalities at point of sale. Was the item produced using water from a common source like a river? How were non-solid waste products disposed? When it’s source materials were extracted, what impact did that have on the extraction site? Not even counting the fossil fuels needed to make the item...

2. Assuming that certain places have lower externalities doesn’t make sense. Aside from the global footprint of trash in general, there have been tons of rehabilitated sites but they will need maintenance and monitoring for hundreds years.

Producing value has no externalities? That's new!

> As for landfills being cheap, that isn't a bad thing. That means the externalities at those sites are low.

No, that means that most of the actual price is not accounted for and is dumped on the public instead.

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