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Comment by nroets | Hacker News Reader

Plastic does not need to be curtailed at source. As long as it ends up in well engineered landfills, there's no problem.

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Why don't we put our plastic in landfills then instead of trying to send it out of country?

Serious question. I mean people are acting like the fact that the Chinese government is stamping out the business of exporting trash is a crisis. Is it possible we can just dump it in a landfill?

If so, why not just do that?

If not, ok, then I understand why everyone is up in arms.

Because everyone recycles these days and it's politically unacceptable to see recyclable materials in the landfill - even if it's cheaper to produce new ones.

In honesty, burying undigestible plastics seems like a great way for carbon sequestration.

I've wondered for quite some time exactly why we don't sequester carbon in this way. Is it really just "we should recycle"? Or is there another (I hate the term but perhaps more "steelmanned") argument for it?

I'm not claiming you're caricaturing the argument, to be clear--I'm just curious if there's another angle to consider.

That's actually where most of the curbside recycling ends up now though - in the landfill. People can still feel good that the plastic container they carefully washed out and placed in the recycle bin like a good citizen is being recycled, but generally it's just going straight into the dump and buried with the rest of the trash, and they wasted even more resources (water) cleaning it out thinking they were doing something good.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfil...

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china...

That's not how sequestration works unless they were burning the plastic before.

Why would you do that, releasing carbon into the air? A PVC or PET container is about half carbon by weight and won't decompose in the next thousand years or so we're told.

Right. So its already sequestered as plastic whether its in the ocean or a landfill. Creating new plastic from oil and then reburying it doesn't sequestrate any more carbon.

But if oil resources are nearing depletion, plastic production diverts crude from being burned as fuel, and pushes it's price up since plastics have a much higher economic value.

> Because everyone recycles these days

That's just it though, isn't it? They don't, really.

My understanding of the "crisis" is that all those well-intentioned recyclers were duly sorting their plastics, which was then picked up by their municipality for "recycling" and then shipped straight to a developing country where it was just dropped on the ground. And everyone felt good about themselves, and nothing was done.

Had recycling not been turned into an "out of sight, out of mind" problem, this whole thing could have been averted and some kind of actual clean disposal or reduction implemented.

In addition, recall that due to some US areas' mandate of "clean garbage" occupying some proportion of landfills, some of the clean recyclables also get dumped in landfills.

> Why don't we put our plastic in landfills then instead of trying to send it out of country?

Because some countries take a lot less money to - supposedly and according to their word - do that job cleanly for us.

We know that in fact they are probably lying, but it is quite difficult to do business like that. If we refused to make business with those countries on that basis, we would be accused of discrimination.

But what countries are taking this trash?

I mean, isn't the entire crisis that China does not take the trash anymore?

So if we have all this trash, why can't we just put it in a landfill?

Because people make money moving it.

At some point in the past, someone proposed that we send plastic overseas for recycling. Win win right?

If any one counter-proposed that it be buried they'd be considered a bad person.

Every meal eaten at most lunch restaurants generates a bunch of plastic that sticks around for a thousand years.

Other animals live on this planet too. Is it fair for us to refuse to make even a small change but expect land and sea animals to deal with our plastic waste?

The landfill solution is another way of saying "put it somewhere I can't see." Would we like plastic storms around own our homes?

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