The world has a lot of important environmental problems, like climate change. Landfill space is not an important environmental problem. You should spend your worrying energy on something else.
The cost isn’t just disposal, it’s also production. Plastic production (‘ethylene cracking’ specifically) is really environmentally gnarly. Communities across the US and internationally will be way better off once we move away from disposable consumer plastics.
If we made less plastic, would the decrease in gas/oil consumption just be increased in other processes?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/business/energy-environme...
If landfills are not such a problem, why "developed" countries (I won't name them but we know who they are) are exporting junk to China, India and Africa? Why simply not set landfills near popular cities so we can all enjoy the beauty of "low environmental issue" problems ;)
These days there is more trust in corrupted media than plain logic.
And those developed countries were willing to sell it.
And yes those developed countries do in fact have landfills and they use them. there are no countries that export pure trash to be landfilled in a third world country.
Of course they do.
Even Toronto was exporting 100 truckloads of trash to Michigan for years until recently.
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2018/02/19/c...
Michigan, perhaps you might have noticed, borders Canada. No one is shipping trash long distance.
Here the landfill has recycling sorting on site and puts glass in the landfill because no one will pay what it costs to ship it.
Most of the popular fear about running out of landfill space can be traced back to a misused statistic about small rural landfills being decommissioned. RCRA Subtitle D regs basically have driven the shutdown of old town dumps. Modern landfills are much more efficient, with better safety controls for leaching and gas capture, better compression and sorting, and even processes that speed decomposition. The headlines will scream that the number of available landfills are dropping rapidly and neglect to mention that total capacity is actually up and total disposed volume has been trending down since 2000, even despite population increases.
Highly recommend touring a landfill and learning about waste management at scale.
There are really interesting engineering dilemmas that are always a step more nuanced than "we must use x solution or fill the world with trash."
Current facilities are way better equipped than the old solution of uncontrolled municipal dumps.
A lot of these fixes are more expensive to fake to code than to just implement, and isolating sources of groundwater pollution can take a few years, but not decades. Also a lot of these people live there and know the risks to their kids' safety.
The environmental engineers who consult on these projects didn't generally go into the field to poison people.
Look at nuclear power. Might be the greatest and cleanest solution in theory. In practice, look at the revelations after Fukushima. Mismanagement, dramatically negligent maintenance, corruption. Would proper management have prevented the incident? Probably not, but it wouldn't have been nearly as bad. Without the tsunami, this might have continued for years to come and who knows how and when shit would've hit the fan in this alternate reality. Then the shitshow that is storing nuclear waste here in Germany. Again instead of listening to scientists and engineers in the end they dumped the metal containers inside an old salt mine. Big surprise, salt water lead to rapid corrosion and now they have to get that shit out again, but thankfully the tax payer cover that bullshit. Another example? 737 MAX. Yet again a story of a company that kept cutting costs over years and years until it blew up in their faces. It ticked pretty much all the boxes over the year. Cutting corners, saving costs, budget restrictions, ignoring concerns by engineers in charge, you name it.
It's always the same pattern. If Apple doesn't innovate, cheaps out on components, scraps QA, their products might eventually suck so much that nobody will buy them anymore and they'll just disappear, but who cares. Nuclear isn't bad. Aviation isn't bad. Landfills aren't. But these are these kinds of industries where negligence can have catastrophic results. And especially something that is as long term as a landfill is predestined for this kind of failure.
Perhaps it just needs rebranded as pre-emptive landfill mining?
But, in a thousand or even a million years the atoms will still be around. Basically we may find this stuff useless, but that does not mean it’s permanently devoid of value. If nothing else archeology often involves going through trash heaps from ages past.
Not unlike how people recycle ships and electronics right now
http://waste-technology.co.uk/what-is-a-dirty-mrf-and-why-th...
A substantial portion of the waste stream is just organic material (which is worth very little).
Is it the correct solution, if we have already shifted our economies to carbon-neutral or -negative modes?
These are very different situations, and we only have time and money to focus on so many things at once.
This is partly due to the energy cost of new vs recycled so somewhat ironically landfill becomes a slightly better option as the grid becomes more renewable, though unlikely to pull ahead of recycling, since it also takes energy that would be getting cleaner.
i very, very much doubt that said study existed at the time these decisions were made.
also the energy cost is a wash (or loss) for almost all but aluminum. glass would be fine but we are awash in glass, so AIUI cardboard and aluminum are the only consumer items worth recycling when consider energy and other input costs. i’ve no idea on total climate impact (eg greenhouse gas production) though and i don’t doubt you. i only doubt your assertion that governments made these decisions with that in mind.
and
https://www.wrap.org.uk/content/environmental-benefits-recyc...
A summary from the latter talking specifically about plastic (though the document covers other materials):
The results confirm that mechanical recycling is the best waste management option in respect of the climate change potential, depletion of natural resources and energy demand impacts. The analysis highlights again that these benefits of recycling are mainly achieved by avoiding production of virgin plastics.
The environmental benefits are maximised by collection of good quality material (to limit the rejected fraction) and by replacement of virgin plastics on a high ratio (1 to 1).
Incineration with energy recovery performs poorly with respect to climate change impact
Landfill is confirmed as having the worst environmental impacts in the majority of cases.
As the UK moves to a lower-carbon energy mix, recycling will become increasingly favoured.
One of the studies said the costs of sorting made the benefits of plastic recycling negligible to iffy, confirming parent's claim that aluminum drives recycling value and plastics are a wash.
They shouldn't be allowed to call it a meta-analysis if they just read three studies and picked the conclusions they liked best.
They also found 20 papers that dealt with the climate change emissions and total energy use and ranked them on those factors as well.
The comment I replied to specifically said that we shouldn't worry about landfill space as we have more important issues like climate change, so that's 95% of studies found suggesting that opinion isn't based on facts and that landfill would be a worse option than recycling plastic for greenhouse gas emissions, which we've agreed is a serious problem. (And landfill broadly tied with burning it for energy on greenhouse gas emissions with different assumptions giving different answers).
To your point about total energy use, landfill comes out worst consistently and recycling best.
You could make the leap and assume the process that uses the least energy and releases the least greenhouse gases is also the least expensive economically (if you account for externalities) but that's a bonus on top of providing useful information that could change opinions related to greenhouse gas emissions.
You seem to doubt that governments made decisions based on facts, yet the facts now support their decision, while your stated beliefs about energy usage are contradicted by the science.
Is it not possible that the environmental benefits of recycling plastics had actually been considered by governments that brought in legislation? Where does your belief that it was ever considered likely to be a counterproductive activity come from? Did they convince you of anything else, like solar panels not making sense or EVs being worse for the environment, or wind turbines boondoggles? All those were similarly supported by effective government support programs and repaid the investment greatly.
> You seem to doubt that governments made decisions based on facts,
It's actually the reverse, I've become more skeptical because so many recycling programs are now just landfilling plastic because the costs no longer justify recycling it.
The price of oil should tell us something about the relative efficiency of recycling plastic. It would be weird if there was zero relation.
Oil prices being consistently low for a decade probably contribute to shifting efficiencies here.
I worry more generally about reuse and recycle heuristics since early environmental impact studies showed they frequently produce bad results. But that doesn't mean they always do.
Maybe you're right and those input factors haven't changed enough to affect the total cost math.
It is not. the paper you cited (thank you) was written in 2017. But more to the point, governments don’t work that way.
If in fact the reason for recycling is environmental benefit, we (USA anyway) would not be in the situation where we are putting plastics back in landfills, and we would not have been in the prior situation where we dump plastic and ewaste to other countries with no oversight whatsoever on what happens to it once it leaves our shores. the environmental impact is the same, here or there.
Let me guess you're American, where free space is plenty? In most of Europe, space is constrained and about half the EU has banned ordinary landfills for that reason.
Also, landfills are an inherent danger to their surroundings in case the bottom barrier breaks and fluids seep into groundwater or that more-or-less uncontrollable fires break out.