Sweden sends just 1% of its trash to landfills

>Tradeoffs everywhere.

I wish every journalist writing about complex environmental topics would just start every first draft with that sentence, and then evolve it into an article.

How does one deal with ground water pollution when just leaving trash in the ground? It must be much easier to clean pollutants like heavy metals from gases , than it is to clean whatever the rain dissolves out from under a landfill? Being Swedish, the idea of leaving trash in a hole at all feels strange. But then I'm assuming incineration is reasonably "clean" in the sense that pollutants can be filtered.

> Tradeoffs everywhere.

Indeed.

Incinerators can emit 2.5 times more greenhouse gasses than coal-fired plants, according to a 2021 Earthjustice report. They emit up to 18 times more lead and 14 times more mercury, along with elevated levels of other harmful emissions, it said. ref: https://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/2022/04/01/burning...

I'm with you in that I'm not unilaterally condemning one method but it'd be helpful to have some progress-based comparisons. eg: Compared to burying, burning reduces % of methane emissions. Outputs of these toxins increases by %, primarily affecting a region of sq mi. Overall, burning [effects] CO2 by %.

Aren’t they just releasing toxic fumes into the atmosphere?

Yeah I'm a little skeptical of the "we make less of this ... because we make a whole lot of that" kinda trades. Not that it can't be a good trade, but for me "less landfill" is not the biggest fight I'd want to fight ...

"Waste-to-energy prevents proper recycling"

Trouble is proper [Plastic] recycling is expensive and rarely done - in UK governmnet pays by the ton for recycling, which mostly consists of companies that pay another poorer country to take our trash, where it is usually not properly disposed of, and it ends up burnt or in the ocean.

Internatuonal trash trade should really be illegal - it is fundamentally uncontrollable, full of fraud and corruption.

I would rather we manage the trash here imperfectly, wherether that's landfilling or burning. At here we can have a handle on it.

Edit - spesified plastic

> And Sweden imports trash to burn, raking in $100m/year in doing so.

Which is basically nothing. Sweden's annual expenditure is $100 billion, meaning this covers 0.1% of their expenses. That's the equivalent of a person on 50k getting $50 as some offm

Agreed with all of the rest of your points though!

Wow, they import all that pollution for about the ARR of a small SaaS company? Jesus, that's embarrassing.

"Recycling" means "the landfill is on the other half of the globe".

> I'm also not particularly against landfills, which are in a sense merely a form of carbon and pollutant sequestration

I personally think that landfills are underrated, but is this true? Landfills produce a lot of methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas.

I am all against trash incineration. The bulk of it is hydrocarbons (plastics/paper etc). Burning means turning solid or liquid carbon into gaseous CO2. Imho a kilo of carbon buried in a landfill is less damaging than a kilo of it floating around the atmosphere.

I've started to see a degree of synergy in landfills. Carbon is extracted from the ground in solid or liquid forms (mined coal/oil). Burning it into CO2 causes climate change. But landfills bury carbon back in the ground from whence it came, at least out of the atmosphere. Turning trash into invisible CO2 might look good but is doesn't help the climate. We might not like the sight of trash piles but we need to have a serious talk about whether burying is actually worse than releasing yet more carbon into the atmosphere. Nothing ever really goes away.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_rates_by_country sweden isnt doing too bad at "normal recycling" (7th in that list).

> “Our recent report found high levels of persistent organic pollutants like dioxins or furans around waste incinerators in three countries"

That would be alarming news in a country that doesn't burn oil or coal like a dioxin junkie.

Landfill is worse than incineration with energy recovery, though both are at the bottom of the list of options:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_hierarchy#/media/File:Wa...

Most of the plastics I deal with is packaging. North of 60% of all packaging material was recycled. So that needs to come from somewhere.

Landfills give off huge amounts of greenhouse gases

I used to work designing landfills and they're not a bad choice. Right now many landfills in the us are the worlds largest bags. They definitely are now better engineered so that toxic substances have less chance of leaching into the ground.

They roll out large sheets of plastic and weld them together. Some states (NY) require dual liners (bags in a bag) and piping to collect the liquid that comes out at the bottom "(leachate). When they put the plastic top on holes are made to allow waste gas to escape. Landfills tend to be dry and nothing rots in them.

I think they work well, but its better to reduce the waste going into them. I'm assuming many places in the world aren't handling the trash like this leading to issues with groundwater contamination and other problems.

If the trash was sorted so we buried "caches" of plastic separate from chemicals, cardboard, electronics, etc I think there is some short term sense here. My issue with landfills is that mixing all that stuff into a big pile in the ground just makes more useless for the future. I believe that future us might find a way to make use of some of these types of waste if they were separated and easy to get back. To put it another way, at least make it as easy as possible for the future to try to fix this if we must be so wasteful.

>I don't understand people's aversion to landfills. Perhaps it's because people intuitively understand that dumping garbage is not sustainable indefinitely, i.e. Earth will eventually run out of room. However, there is currently plenty of space for landfills.

That's exactly it. It's the whole reason why there was a huge recycling push in the 80s/90s.

>GONZALEZ: There were all these stats coming out at the time that showed that the number of landfills in America was plummeting. Landfills were closing, and people kept citing these stats in stories about the garbage barge.

>KINNAMAN: And so people put it all together, and in their minds, the conclusion was that the United States is running out of landfill space. The United States was full - that we couldn't store any more.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/739893511

> “Our recent report found high levels of persistent organic pollutants like dioxins or furans around waste incinerators in three countries.”

Three incinerators out of...? And why a potential violation of EU regulation would mean that incineration as a hole is bad?

There are plenty of incredibly clean incinerators, with emissions of dioxins and furans so low that you need to accumulate them over multiple days to be able to even detect them sometimes. If you use that recovered energy for heating, you probably avoid emitting other pollutants (even dioxins and furans).

The alternative is landfill disposal of non-inert waste, which is way worse than any kind of incineration, and it is very hard and complex to manage properly. There are plenty of landfill disasters.

"That’s why ICE car drivers think what they do is fine." I'm sorry what? ICE car drivers don't have an option to think most of time because there are no other options. For almost the entirety of driving there have been two options, gas or diesel. Hybrids have slowly started to arrive, electric cars even slower. This idea that everyone is just out there picking ICE cars because they don't care what comes out the tail pipe is a joke. People are broke, finance cars to 96 month terms, for a $17,000 used car. If there were affordable options for hybrid or electric cars sure, but this grand idea that the general public has a choice in the matter grinds my gears.

> Because things go “puff” and you can’t seem them doesn’t mean the problem is gone.

What makes you think anyone who suggests this is a good idea is under the impression that incineration makes things go away?

> Because things go “puff” and you can’t seem them doesn’t mean the problem is gone.

In many cases it is, because proper incineration leads to chemical degradation of waste to simpler compounds. There are still some ash and flue gases that needs to be properly handled.

That's a great prompt for some fun industrial design especially for liquids - meeting criteria of being strong, packable, easily cleaned, easy to pour, etc. Fun!

Every kind of packaging should be from some (very clearly visually distinguishable, e.g. with a mandated specific color) single recyclable/compostable material. No more mixed-material packages of (non-biodegradable) plastic film stuck to cardboard. No more one-off specialty plastics for packaging. No more wrapping sheets of plastic around everything. No more Mylar. No more plastic single-piece candy wrappers. No more loads of plastic tape everywhere. A lot more cardboard / waxed paper food packaging. Etc. And vendors should pay whatever the full lifecycle of their products/packaging costs.

It should be possible for every consumer to easily clean and sort their waste into a relatively small number of bins, or for a recycling sorting center to easily sort mixed-stream waste into the appropriate homogeneous categories. Everything that can’t be easily sorted should be required to be biodegradable.