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Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but why is that bad if it is responsibly disposed of?

Sure, some landfills can leak, but that's a design flaw of landfills. Is it bad to responsibly dispose of single use plastic in a landfill where it may be reclaimed by future technology?

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(Largely anecdotal) I live in Vietnam. The garbage collection system here consists of setting small trash bags on the curb or just throwing trash in the gutter. Each night, scavengers tear open the bags and scatter the trash looking for items of value. Later, trash collectors sweep up the mess.

As you can imagine, this process means lots of trash never makes it to the landfill. Vietnam is one long coast with several major, densely populated river deltas. All that loose trash makes it’s way to the sea, to be broken down into micro-plastics by the sun and wave action. Those micro-plastics bioaggregate in some of our favorite fish and crustaceans. I suppose it is fitting that we consume it ourselves.

Recently, I travelled to Delhi where there is a ban in single use plastic. There was a lot less litter. This could be due to different a trash collection system, culture, etc. There was some paper litter, but I didn’t see the epidemic of plastic food containers I see in VN, Thailand, and Cambodia.

Yes, if landfill leak prevention fails to scale upwards in concert with production. If plastic production is to increase 30% in a single year, while landfill technology presumably will not advance leak prevention by that degree, then it takes 23% fewer landfills leaking to pollute the environment by the same amount. If plastic production incurred sufficient investment in landfill technology to shrink leakage by 23% in that year of 30% growth, then at least it would be neutral rather than bad. (Napkin math caveat applies!)

Or we can stop acting like spoiled children and impulse shop prepackaged crap (a few tomatoes wrapped in plastic that lasts hundreds of years) and with a bit more effort and planning consume things in a much more sustainable way. Every time I go into a modern supermarket I get annoyed with rows upon rows of small amounts of food wrapped in plastic

That's a very big if. "If responsibly disposed of" has an approximately zero percent chance of occurring. And even then, some things will get accidentally dropped or discarded.

It's just not a realistic starting point to build an argument around. You have to assume people will improperly dispose of it as an axiom.

What percentage of single use plastics is responsibly disposed of? That's the question and answer to your question.

In the Bay Area, I'm going to guess something like 99% or higher. If it was even a single percent, our streets would be wall to wall garbage.

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