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Comment by Causality1 | Hacker News Reader

You also have to think in terms of actual harm. Considering the US has an absurd amount of junk land it can use for landfills, a single use plastic object that has 1/1000 the carbon emissions of the reusable alternative may be the best environmental choice.

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I'm surprised every time I hear the concept of "land fill" in conjunction with trash. As if the natural thing to do with waste is... put it in a hole in the ground? It feels like some 50's conception of environment policy to me. Shouldn't things be either recycled as much as possible, and the rest incinerated for energy?

Surprisingly, no - just dumping shit in a big hole is the most environmentally friendly thing to do - least energy used, least pollution created.

The problem is having the space in some place where neither flora nor fauna will be affected.

That’s the problem though isn’t it. Assuming trash will never be without electronics, batteries etc, it will end up in water. As far as I understand, burning in decent facilities should keep most nasty stuff out of the atmosphere and ground water (e.g heavy metals)

Since the late 80's, American landfills are required to be lined and equipped with water treatment facilities to preven groundwater contamination. Doesn't completely eliminate the risk of course.

The best thing is not to use something at all. Find a way to avoid buying useless stuff. Such as specialised tools. Especially in the kitchen.

That's how nature have dealt with trash for as long as earth has existed.

Landfills are "holes in the ground", I won't deny it. But a lot is happening in these holes, will all sorts of microorganisms breaking down stuff. Well managed landfills try to minimise impact to the environment with that knowledge.

In an oversimplified way, our landfills are putting oil back where it came from. Recycling and incineration are good too, but so are well managed landfills. It all depends on the situation/materials/...

Where is the "junk land"? Almost everywhere has animals that likely don't enjoy plastic.

How important are those animals?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem

Landfill? Somewhere buried?

You could restrict yourself to dry lake beds that don't flood in winter, which are nearly as lifeless as Mars, and still have enough landfill area for centuries of waste.

The average American produces 3.5 pounds of trash per day at an average one third of a gram per cubic centimeter. Assuming that holds steady, and we use a normal landfill depth of 400 feet, and the US population doubles over the next century, we need a landfill area of 250 square miles to cover us for the next hundred years.

Compared to available land that's tiny.

Using standard units:

- 1589g of trash per day!

- 4767 cm3 to store it (3cm3/gram)

- 130 m3 per lifetime (75yr)

- 300,000,000 lifetimes.

- 78 km3 storage allocated

- 39 km3 required

~~We're gonna need a bigger boat.~~

Neat!

> - 39,000,000,000 km3 required

I think something went very wrong there!

4767 x 75 x 365 = I get 130,500,000 cm³/person/lifetime. You got 130,000,000,000,000,000.

There are 10¹⁵ cubic centimetres in a cubic kilometre, not 10⁶. I think all your numbers are for m³, not km³, a factor of a billion out, so your final figure should be 39 km³.

Thanks, I've edited (working from mobile, some copy paste issues with long numbers). I think it's right now? (How do you get the <sup>3</sup>?)

should be 39km2 not km3

Nevada. Just fill in old mines?

Bringing jobs back to Goldfield and Tonopah! And we needs more hands down Yellowjacket Mine

Omg, travel the USA more. So. Much. Land.

“Do animals prefer plastic or no plastic” is a false choice. The real choice is “do animals prefer plastic or rapid global warming”.

Much of Nevada is a lifeless desert. There is a reason it was chosen for nuclear bomb testing.

It's not lifeless. You can look it up but it's more fun to go out and see it for yourself. The desert out there is quite beautiful and there are loads of critters.

Yes, but those critters are a long way away and so they don’t really exist.

I lived there. There is very little life in the Nevada salt flats.

Anywhere outside of a city centre, according to many. I live in a rural area. People drive out here from the city to dump their old appliances in the forests of this “junk land”. Almost every road corner has a pile of refrigerators and washing machines next to it. My current refrigerator was rescued from one of these impromptu landfills. Nothing at all wrong with it, just five years old, so it’s trash.

Just because you can’t see it, just because it doesn’t have value to property developers, does not make it junk.

I mean, by this logic, we should just dump our trash in the “junk water” which covers much of the planet.

Ok. I guess if you’re all of the view this is wrong, would you mind if I came and dumped stuff in your city apartment? It looks like junk to me.

I don't know why you decided someone saying the US has plenty of junk land must be talking about your home. I was referring to dry salt flats, abandoned strip mines, and the like. The vast amounts of space under major cities would also make good landfill volume.

Because the entire idea that land can be junk leads to a rapid broadening of the definition of junk. Your NIMBY attitude of “out of sight, out of mind” is exactly how we ended up in this mess in the first place.

> a single use plastic object that has 1/1000 the carbon emissions of the reusable alternative may be the best environmental choice.

Is there any data that single use stuff (of any kind) creates less carbon emissions? I would expect it to be the other way around, except for some edge cases.

Yes, mostly because of the energy used in their creation. For example you have to reuse a cotton grocery bag 7100 times before you break even with plastic bags for carbon footprint.

https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...

You're probably not going to do that.

Aren't the plastic bags mainly a problem because they tend to end up in places where they don't belong at all, like oceans etc.? They can't really decompose or anything like that, they just shred to tiny little pieces that mess with animals (and ultimately also our) digestion, no?

Yup. There are places where plastic bags accumulate. Once it was my doorstep. Every morning there were piles of plastic bags that were delivered to my house.

Just take a trip along any river or stream near a town and you’ll find them swimming by like lifeless jellyfish

And microplastics don't just mess with digestion, they're also theorized to be part of the reason fertility is dropping in humans over time.

You have not read the document that you link. Else, you would have noticed that it states that a not-organic cotton bag has to be reused 52 times for the same relative impact on climate change. The 7100 is impact on ozone depletion:

p. 18: 'Conversely, for composite and cotton the very high number of reuse times is given by the ozone depletion impact alone. Without considering ozone depletion, the number of reuse times ranges from 50 to 1400 for conventional cotton, from 150 to 3800 for organic cotton, and from 0 to 740 for the composite material bag. The highest number is due to the use of water resource, but also to freshwater and terrestrial eutrophication'.

And as I have commented elsewhere: I have cotton bags that I have easily used 500 times. If I had used an old T-shirt for the bag or later use the old bag for cleaning purposes, the 7,100 becomes very relative.

There's plenty of data. For example, producing single-use plastic grocery bags uses such a trivial amount of energy and resources that it almost doesn't matter—thousands and thousands of times less than an equivalent cotton bag. The bigger problem is disposal. If single-use plastics can be safely sequestered in landfills, that's a mostly solved problem, but that isn't always the case.

What about paper bags?

I seem to remember that paper bags are close to single-use plastic bags, but still use more energy to produce and also require wood pulp. Paper bags can easily be recycled, but "single-use" plastic bags can easily be re-used as household trash bags, or otherwise. So it's a toss-up.

> re-used as household trash bags

But that’s a one-time reuse for something that’s not going to biodegrade when it ends up in the ocean or landfill

It should never end up in the ocean, and nothing really biodegrades in landfill, especially not paper.

I mean, I disagree with both of those statements entirely. Do you have any sources? I do, but not googling at the moment.

EDIT: quick Google search has many sources listing paper degrading in 2-6 weeks in landfills. Plastic in the ocean… I think you need to b by broaden your horizons if you think that doesn’t happen

Paper degrades if it is near the surface, mixed with loose dirt, and still getting oxygen. If it's packed down under feet of compacted soil and other trash it degrades much more slowly.

I thought the heat deep within landfills is intense from all sorts of things degrading.

It depends entirely on the content of the waste and the levels of moisture and air infiltration.

Some landfills are known to generate huge amounts of methane, and ooze black sludge at the surface. This famously occured after the 1989 San Francisco earthquake.

In contrast, landfills in arid places can preserve trash like a museum:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-07-17-mn-14066-...

You think plastics should end up in the ocean? Why? It definitely should not, and if waste is managed correctly, it doesn't.

And I'm not saying decomposition doesn't happen at all in landfills; it very clearly does, but the sort of decomposition that takes place is incomplete and slow, because landfills aren't ideal places for decomposition to occur. But that doesn't matter. Once it's buried, who cares if it takes 300 years to decompose?

> You think plastics should end up in the ocean? Why? It definitely should not, and if waste is managed correctly, it doesn't.

I think that enough people don't give a shit about where their waste goes, that any coastal community will lose a fraction of its waste to the drink. That isn't where most of the plastic in the ocean comes from, but the difference between "should" and "inevitably won't" is vast.

If nothing did, landfills couldn't harvest methane as fuel.

I've seen some grass cardboard pop up in the few deliveries we get. The wood pulp is probably negotiable and increasingly more so.

I think a benefit of paper bags would be encouraging planting trees to make more bags

> re-used as household trash bags

this is what i do, and if they were banned i'd be using some sort of bag and then purchasing trash bags separately using maybe twice the resources?

This is exactly what I've been doing since moving to Austin.

I get paper bags at the grocery and throw them out immediately after a single use, and now I have to also buy plastic garbage bags for under the sink, which I never used to do.

But isn’t the way the disposable plastic bags are so cheap actually one of the sneaky ways they are bad? It’s definitely not good for the environment but is a hard to break out or local minima.

The Reason Foundation (which is slightly right leaning of center, but makes its case using actual studies and facts) has a great explainer on how plastic bag bans for example hurt the environment more than help and cost consumers (including low income individuals) an extra $1b/yr: https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/california_plast...

Does anywhere have an actual plastic bag ban? Usually it’s just a minimum price to discourage people from grabbing a new bag on every visit

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_lightweight_plast...

Reason is a libertarian think tank. Describing them as “slightly right leaning of center” is really sugarcoating things - their whole raison d’etre is coming up with arguments to oppose virtually any and all government regulations. That doesn’t make them wrong necessarily, but let’s call a spade a spade.

But there’s basically no reasonable way to say that single use plastic is good for the environment. They are clearly a local minima that has seemed tricky for the market to break out of. Unless they make a case that that single use bags are actually the global minima or the global minima is just not worth it, the reason foundation is being rather myoptic when presenting why people attempts to get out of the local minima are bad.

The only sustainable way to dispose of plastic is incineration.

Otherwise you poison the land and water that flows through the land.

Is turning plastic into CO2 in an incinerator really the best solution for the planet this century?

I'm down for recycling or burial in landfills, but CO2 seems like something we need to minimize this century.

If it’s 1000 times less than paper/wood then hell yeah

Sorry, but given the “half life” of a single use plastic item with respect to its usability, isn’t it’s environment cost essentially infinite?

Does the US still operate landfills? Some or all EU countries have completely abandoned the practice. So that's just not a harm that matters, unlike some other ones.

In any case, it'd be compounding the problem here, and rather bad economics at the same time. Plastics aren't that hard to collect/separate, especially if it's ok to be mixed with paper. They burn readily and, given high temperatures, cleanly, allowing the recuperation of a significant fraction of its energy content.

Then, there's recycling, of course. Not always possible, but not entirely impossible, either.

Yes, the US still has landfills as does Europe.

“In 2018, 24% of all municipal waste generated in the EU was landfilled.” That said, incineration is a similar option that drastically lowers volume of waste, but still produced ash that ends up buried and vast amounts of CO2.

Yeah, the news I remembered were about Germany, specifically. it, and a few others, are at <=1% landfill: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/201...

That’s extremely misleading Germany simply uses incinerators before dumping the ash in landfills.

“One nation now grappling with the legacy of its long embrace of incineration is Denmark. The country, one of Europe’s biggest waste producers, built so many incinerators that by 2018 it was importing a million tons of trash.”

https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-europe-a-backlash-is-growi...

Source: https://ec.europa.eu/environment/topics/waste-and-recycling/...

The goal in the EU is to reduce it to 10% in 15 years.

The USA landfill was of 50% in 2018. Some more legislation is needed. https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...

Is incineration of plastic really better for the environment than a landfill? And would the ash not go to a landfill of sorts?

It's "just" carbohydrates - in theory it's no worse than burning oil or gas for heating/electricity, if you make sure everything burns at high enough temperature to burn cleanly and have filters at the exhaust to catch anything that survived the processes.

I'd say it's a positive, we use oil to produce plastics, if that oil is used to produce energy after its plastic form is no longer needed....that's a plus in my book. But maybe on the other hand it's better if it stays in the landfill instead of being burnt and releasing the bound carbon into the atmosphere.

From a C02 perspective, if it's burned cleanly and the energy released is used to generate electricity or heat homes, it's really not much different than a natural gas plant. But I agree with your point.

A modern plant turns plastic into CO_2, electricity, and, often, residential heat. So, yes, that's preferable. Among the sheer ugliness and wastefulness of landfills, burning at high temperature avoids the toxic intermediates plastics give off when degrading in nature, which landfills struggle to contain.

Ash is, by definition, inert. It is the remaining mass that does not chemically react even under extreme heat. It therefore also does not interact with, for example, the human body. Plastics are all carbon/hydrogen/nitrogen/oxygen, and, to a first approximation, do not leave any ash. In reality they do, but it's extremely little and harmless.

(Physical harms can survive an incinerator, such as material giving off radiation, but those should never be in the trash)

Incinerator ash and fume often has a very high concentration of heavy metals, comparable to coal ash. Definitely not harmless.

You're correct that sufficient incineration temperatures ensure the complete destruction of organic intermediaries, such as dioxins.

I cannot put a source to it but I remeber to have heard the ash landfills (that are hermetically sealed) are designed to be resource deposites once they are full. It does not make sense to recycle the involved metals etc. while its almost empty but should be worthwile once a large deposite is established.

>>Some or all EU countries have completely abandoned the practice.

Absolutely not true, glad you maybe live in a country where landfills are disappearing, but they will always exist in some form - even with burning where do you think the slag goes to? That's right, a normal landfill. Not everything can be burnt, and not everything can be recycled.

And definitely not "all" EU countries - Poland has normal landfills that take everything still, very few operational waste incenerators, and recycling is still unknown to a lot of people.

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