The answers to your suggestion start with knowing the volume of plastic, time to degrade, degradation byproduct toxicity, and alternative 'recycling' methods and their costs.
There's also clear evidence that the 'current' model and practice for plastic disposal (that you endorse) is NOT safe and effective. Until you can suggest how to fix its demerits, it's unhelpful to blithely suggest we just keep doing it.
If it is less energy intensive to create new plastics rather than recycling (which seems to be the case), why not just safely bury the old plastics and make new ones, it should be better for the environment anyways. Of course you should try to reduce and reuse before throwing out plastics, but if you have to get rid of them landfills seem reasonable.
I agree with you. Recycling is stupid; weirdly enough it's a major contributor(? Totally not the right word) to homelessness.
Secondly, it's allowed to be 'disposed of' internationally. Who knows what the Chinese and Indians are doing with it.
Instead of CRV at the consumer level, we should have susidies or direct payments to suppliers for reusing plastic. All the plastic that isn't 'intrinsically valuable', ends up safely in a landfill.
Honestly curious.
As plastics it is "broken down" into microplastics, and gets into things and areas it was never intended to be. It is then consumed and builds up in the systems of animals, and even eventually by us.
Even your local landfill, is part of a management system, but will it really last 3,000 years?
We can't just keep adding and adding to it, we can't cover the planet in landfills of plastic, we aren't putting the "oils" back to where they came from.
In Canada, I remember being taught "give a hoot, don't pollute", and to us, as kids, that meant "don't create trash" as much as "clean up your trash".
> We can't just keep adding and adding to it, we can't cover the planet in landfills of plastic, we aren't putting the "oils" back to where they came from.
Why does it matter if it's the same spot?
More importantly there's only so much oil and putting it all in landfills would not cover the planet.
Your crushed 4L milk jug in a landfill isn't much of a source of microplastics, nor is it much of a threat to the water table (I mean, we use that same plastic for food).
In many places we knew oil was there because it was leaking out.
Some of the deposits were exposed to the surface. We have ancient records of people making use of it to make adhesive or caulk boats. Those have just tended to have gotten used up by now.
In all seriousness landfills get a really bad reputation but aren’t the worst thing in the world.
Plastic… asshole.”
Full text: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/251836-we-re-so-self-import...