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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular opinion: there's nothing wrong with not recycling plastic and sending it right to the landfill. It sequesters carbon, isn't too terrible for the environment (it just sits there in the ground), and it's not like we're going to run out of landfill space any time soon[1]. I'm all for recycling if it's a net positive in terms of resource consumption, but I don't see the appeal of recycling for the sake of recycling.

[1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/739893511 "Thomas says we probably have thousands of years of landfill space left in the U.S. And even hardcore environmentalists reluctantly agree that, yeah, we have a lot of space left. But people thought we were running out of space, and that was what mattered."

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It is going to break down into small microplastics and potentially leak out into the water supply and then the wider food chain. What happened in the oceans is mostly about dumped fishing gear and all the "ask no questions recycling" sent to asia to be processed finding its way into the oceans rather than the landfilled material but it is still breaking down in a similar way and needs to be dealt with properly

> direct release of microplastics from road runoff during rain and storm events equates to 44% of global release of microplastics into our oceans [1].

> Car tires and synthetic clothing are major sources of plastic pollution [2].

Check out nice infographics [3]

[1] https://www.celticwater.co.uk/bloghow-does-plastic-get-into-...

[2] https://resourcelab.dk/plastics/pollution/oceans/2018/10/11/...

[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=microplastics+source&tbm=isc...

There are ways to re-sequester plastic in landfills that won't lead to that - Generally even poorly managed landfull will be a better option than the same amount of plastic sitting around in the general environment breaking down rapidly in the presence of UV and heat, not to mention the damage it does to wildlife.

Landfill isn't a perfect solution for plastic waste, especially if it isn't well managed. But it is, on the balance of factors, one of the better options available to us currently.

I believe that modern landfills are not permitted to have run-offs (i think the term is 'leachate') into the environment. There is a water-tight lining between the ground and the actual landfill.

So I suspect that in practice plastics sent to landfills are effectively sealed from the environment, at least in most Western countries.

If a landfill is leaking into the water supply, micro plastic particles are the very least of your concerns.

I think there is a misconception that landfill is bad because it used to actually be bad many decades ago. Now there is a lot of regulation around what is required to build a landfill site, and a lot more technical knowledge on how to do it safely. This is a pattern I see occasionally where folks learn something when they are young, and repeat it long past when it ceases to be true, never noticing that it has become a falsehood.

It’s a different issue in countries with less land (Japan being the most extreme one) where landfill is just too expensive because land is expensive. But the US has lots of unused and cheap land that nobody would notice if you added a well-run landfill to.

It depends where in the world you live. I live in Vietnam and a couple of weeks ago they burnt the entire local landfill site because it was too full (for a city of about 200,000 people, took about 4 days to burn). Now, I'm pretty sure that's not government policy here and probably illegal... But that doesn't change the fact that for a lot of the world, that's still how landfill works.

In March 2019 storm water released 135 tonnes of rubbish from a landfill on the west coast of NZ, spreading it across a 64km area of otherwise natural beauty. It was touch-and-go on declaring it a national disaster but in the end it wasn't, and it fell to volunteers to clean up the surface evidence of the spill, at least what hadn't made it down the fox river and out to sea.

Quite a bit more of that kind of thing expected with the increase in extreme weather events from climate change. In Westland alone there are another 12 at-risk old landfill sites. It's estimated that the cost of preventing further spills from the one already-open landfill alone is ~2.3M. In an economically depressed region like Westland it won't be funded, and they're far from the only region in NZ that's facing this problem. Just the first to have experienced a spill event.

I think cleaning up old sites should be prioritized; this is kind of the same commons maintenance as decommissioning old nuclear reactors.

Unfortunately the purely-for-profit structure of these long-term ventures can mean that there is no money to cover the cleanup if things go really wrong, depending on who owns the site. I think you need to look at some sort of cleanup fund in escrow as a precondition for building sites like this, which should incentivize improvements in safety measures too.

For sure, I’ve argued for an equivalent of the superfund for NZ previously, and to bring it to bear on site remediations such as this. It’s not a perfect model, but heck it’s better than doing things ad-hoc and asking for point funding, turning things that should have been foreseen and managed over the long term into unpleasant sudden surprises.

Absolutely. This is one of the big problems with recycling as currently implemented in the US; it’s based on shipping our waste to countries with much worse waste-handling practices.

Not just recycling but rubbish too, often disguised as recycling.

I agree and my views have been influenced by this post I found on HN bit more than a year ago https://medium.com/@robertwiblin/what-you-think-about-landfi...

For reference this was the discussion that happened around it on HN then https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20433851

> It sequesters carbon, isn't too terrible for the environment (it just sits there in the ground), and it's not like we're going to run out of landfill space any time soon[1].

I could care less about the space personally, I think that’s a non-issue, but let’s not romanticize plastic as being harmless or somehow good for us. The danger of this argument is that, like recycling, it encourages more plastic use and more plastic waste, rather than committing to doing what we most need, which is to stop using so much of it, especially for single-serving, single-use convenience, where viable alternatives don’t just exist but have been widely used.

We can sequester carbon best by not pulling it out of the ground, plastic production and distribution uses a lot, and putting it in the landfill doesn’t exactly make up for it.

Plastic production has toxic byproducts, and leeches toxic waste into the ground & water. By “isn’t too terrible for the environment”, what are we comparing to? It’s pretty bad compared to a lot of the actionable alternatives we have.

I'm not sure the parent poster was calling for continued or increased use of plastics alongside landfilling. We need to do ALL of what you said and ALSO what the parent poster said.

Not digging up more sequestered carbon, and utilizing long-term-stable methods of re-sequestering that which has already been released is needed. Landfilling (after, if necessary for the type of plastic being handled, appropriate treatment/encapsulation) is an appropriate tool to bring to bear.

In terms of plastic in circulation, what alternative handling do you have in mind?

That's fine but...

* right now way to much seems to just end up in the ocean or blowing around. Good luck getting 7bn people to properly dispose of their trash...

* I don't think you can call it sequestering carbon if the carbon was never in the air to start with. And that's assuming no one starts burning their trash

* you still need to extract a lot of oil to make that plastic. That means emissions and pollution and sending money to shitty regimes. Then you have to process the oil into plastic with more emissions and pollution etc.

I don't think anyone serious thinks all plastic should be banned. It just needs to be used more responsibly. I bought some ham today. Each slice had a plastic sheet separating it from the others (why?). Then 6 slices were in a plastic packet. I got a twin pack so that was 2 packs wrapped in more plastic. Then the cashier looked at me like I was crazy when I declined a plastic bag to carry it in. Do we really need 4 layers of non-reusable protection from cooked ham? Could paper or reusable plastic not have done at least some of those jobs? I think we're still stuck with conspicuous consumption models from the 80s where people wanted that. I don't want that.

/rant

More generally, I agree about landfill.

Thanks for reading

On the other hand, it's worth noticing that the plastic packets + sheets you bought (wasteful and pointless as they are) probably amounted to...5 grams of material?

If we're talking pollution and climate change, imo these debates around plastic are all pointless distractions from the cold brutal fact that our westernised high-energy lifestyles are not sustainable, and certainly not scalable to a world with 10 billion consumers.

We can either get used to living at a standard closer to 1920s Europe in energy use (re flight, transportation), get comfortable with the idea that the wealthier billion or so of us will be much better off than the bottom 9, or wait for most of mankind to die climate-related deaths.

It's reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order. You are arguing that we have no problem, and we don't need to do any of the three! No wonder it's an unpopular opinion. Reducing consumption means reducing production. It doesn't matter how effective litter prevention and recycling programs are, it doesn't matter how seemingly bullet-proof landfills are, some percentage of produced plastic ends up as waste in the environment (estimates range from 5 to 11%). Production goes up, litter goes up. Simple equation.

We need to massively reduce single-use plastics.

Even in advanced landfill-having countries, single-use plastics end up as litter in the environment, but the millions of tons per year. I've personally picked up 500 bags of garbage on 4 different continents. Landfills or not, it's everywhere.

We need to massively reduce single-use plastics.

The problem is the plastic that doesn't make it landfill and is instead in the ocean/rest of the environment

Isn't it more likely that "recycled" plastic being shipped to Asia will end up in the ocean than if you just pitch it in a landfill?

So tossing plastic in the recycle bin is plausibly an environmental net negative.

Right, if the consumer put it in the ocean instead of the trash, that plastic wasn’t going to get recycled either.

If you put it in landfill in the US, it’s definitely in landfill. If you “recycle” it, it may get shipped to China (or now Cambodia) and then dumped somewhere.

How does plastic end up in the ocean? I would have assumed it was through littering or the fishing industry[0], but perhaps some of it is debris that blows from landfill to waterways?

[0] https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3298/7/10/73/htm indicates that a lot of the coastal debris is plastic bags, while a lot of the offshore debris is fishing nets

It gets there lots of ways. A number of places around the world still use the local river as a city dump.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYMuh-5V9fk

Portions of that garbage will eventually make it to an ocean. Especially plastics due to the simple fact that it floats.

That’s plastic to-be recycled, not thrown away. We don’t put our trash on shipping containers, we have closed trucks bring it to landfills. We do put recycling on shipping containers and it often blows off into the ocean or ends up in their world countries that get paid to accept it for “recycling” when they don’t have the means to do so and it just ends up in low quality landfills that leak into rivers/oceans.

So that’s more of a reason to just discard plastic.

There's an interesting follow up investigation [1] npr did a month ago concerning plastic recycling. Essentially they confirm what OPs article claims.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912150085/waste-land

I mostly agree that landfills aren't too terrible for the environment but I think the issue specifically with plastic is that it can stay around for thousands of years.

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