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"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

> Trouble is proper recycling is expensive and rarely done

Especially with plastics. There have been plenty of stories in the past year or two showing that it's basically all been a sham and that it just ends up in the trash.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

Thx for the link. I keep hearing and reading such articles; I need help connecting the dots though - I literally know people who work as "sorters" in local "recyling plants". Is that makeshift work? Why are we sorting, what do the recycling plants do? If there is an intentional deception on such a pervasive low level scale, that's astonishing. At the same time if there's not, what is the operational model or output of the local "recycling plants"? Are they really just sorting places that are unaware all their nicely sorted stuff ends up in same place?

No, there are still other things that are worth recycling. Sorting would separate out aluminum, paper, glass, plastic in a single stream recycling. The recycled material all gets bundled up and tested for some purity (i.e. this giant block of aluminum cans we crushed together is 98% aluminum). It is kind of more the fact that for a the blocks of aluminum, glass and paper there are buyers that can actually use that recycled material (if it is of a high enough purity) but the market for recycled plastic is small so it is likely cheaper to just throw anything plastic (or has some plastic) back in to the garbage.

The purity of the recyclables has been a problem and there are companies (like AMP Robotics [0]) working on machine learning to better sort and re-sort recycled material to get it up to a purity that it is actually financially worth using and won't get abandoned and thrown in the trash.

[0] https://www.amprobotics.com/

Edit: Not to say that there isn't intentional deception as well. The most blatant example I have seen in some municipalities is a city that has a "recycling program" to make people feel good but the trash truck comes by and dumps both the trash bin and recycling bin in to the same truck.

You have to be careful with that last statement. Our truck does the same thing. Its a split body truck, and has separate compartments for garbage and recycling.

Here's an example of one in action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd9-j0rHidU

>If there is an intentional deception on such a pervasive low level scale, that's astonishing.

There is, by ourselves to ourselves. Everyone wants to save the planet, but no one wants to give up their detached single family houses, 2 cars, toys, and trips to Tahiti. Which is why there is no political support for the real solution to the problem - drastic increases in fossil fuel taxes to the point that consumption is drastically curbed.

>> but no one wants to give up their detached single family houses, 2 cars, toys, and trips to Tahiti.

Who has those things? I'd love to own two cars, one would be electric, but my apartment does not have parking available for two. Tahiti? When? I have a job. I have a cellphone. Those things don't go away. Vacations are for the rich and unemployed/retired. We normals spend our "vacation" days catching up on sleep.

(As I type this I realize that I had totally forgotten that is Friday. Weekends are for rich people. I'm going to be at work tomorrow, except for when I duck out to pick up an amazon package before it gets stolen from my apartment lobby. Amazon delivery drivers don't take weekends off either.)

The people that consistently vote and contribute to election campaigns have those things. And many people aspire to have those things, so removing all doubt that they will ever get them may also be an undesirable thought.

For decades there's been a 'climate change denier'-esque movement against recycling. They used to attack all recyling as government overreach, and claim it was a scam invented by the mafia and that it was bad for the planet and other things that now seem ridiculous.

Here's a classic of the genre from 1996:

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-gar...

Notice that even in that, he admits recycling of certain things is a sensible idea, but the bleading heart liberals have taken it too far.

As it became more standard globally they had to slowly shift their target as they retreated. Now they're down to complaining really loudly about how some subset of plastic recycling is all a big scam by evil corporations and using that to pivot to how environmentalist are all stupid and evil and communist and we should never listen to them. Regulating these evil corporations that are lying to us apparently isn't an option.

I hadn't read that in years, amazing to revisit it.

There's a paragraph about how expensive recycling is, which is all sourced from "Keep America Beautiful" the green washing group that are the people cited in the recent "corporate America invented recycling to fool you" stories. That organization was set up originally to stop governments introducing 5 cent returns on bottles in the 1950s, which the corporations didn't want, so instead they said it was all the public's fault. The very next paragraph in the article attacks these return schemes as even worse than recycling.

But the point is that properly burying plastics is better than burning it; that way, fossil fuels are returned into the ground.

This is only true if no fossil fuels are being burnt.

It is getting truer, as the grid becomes greener, which both a) means less fossil fuels are being burnt and b) any energy used for recycling is less carbon intensive, but anyone telling you it was best to bury plastic for the last couple of decades likely was politically connected to the people who sell the raw input for making current plastics, fossil fuels.

It’s also true if burning gas is “cleaner” than burning plastics.

It's not just the burning you need to worry about, there's greenhouse gas concerns around both fossil fuel extraction and landfills.

Energy recovery comes one stop above above disposal or incineration without energy recovery in the waste hierarchy.

I agree. Plastic basically cannot be recycled. Most so-called "recycled" plastic is actually mixed with virgin (new) plastic from oil

I often think about 'How did this work before cheap plastic was avaliable" and often I don;t know the answer. Like supermarkets with pre-packaged food are literally impossible without plastic

A History of Packaging: https://ohioline.osu.edu/factsheet/cdfs-133

Summary: Leaves -> paper -> glued paper -> cardboard -> corrugated cardboard

Also: wax paper, glass, metal

Overall, the article is pretty interesting

> He says what he saw was an industry that didn't want recycling to work. Because if the job is to sell as much oil as you possibly can, any amount of recycled plastic is competition.

Key quote, which nails the key question. Does recycling not work or was it intentionally and turned into a culture war topic in America, while many other nations just got on with it.

And now the same industry, is using their own shady moves in the 70s, to undermine and stall further regulation.

This is like quoting fossil fuel industry internal documents about how renewables can never work, and their ads pretending they were going green, to undermine renewables as a scam.

why do you assume recycling works? If it has never worked (for plastic)? The devil may not be pretending to recycle, but pretending that it could ever work. Pretending recycling works is also to the benefit of commerce to never have to "degrow" or "turn off the tap".

If they genuinely cared about recycling, containers and bottles would all have standard shapes and sizes. That is not a thing afaik.

"containers and bottles would all have standard shapes and sizes"

Indeed, thsts the absolute sinolest thing to do, takes no real effort. Reuse before you recycle - and

It does happen where it's been regulated that it's the producers responsibility to pay for the full cost of disposal. Because it's cheaper.

In Poland, there are many criminal groups which form companies and take waste (usual toxic, sometimes regular municipal) from Western clients and bury them into the ground or just dump on some rented lot. There are hundreds of such cases now. Government is finding these lots full of dangerous chemicals and has to spend taxpayer money to properly dispose of them (it can be as high as 20 milion EU per lot).

Apparently it has started a couple years ago when China banned importing EU waste.

>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.

Same goes for Youtubers who go "in depth" on futuristic technologies. They always hype you up before they introduce some realism.

Yep. Self-driving cars are a great example. They will solve every transportation-related problem a modern city has! Cue the horrible dystopian animation of an intersection without traffic lights. Sorry to be a Luddite buzzkill, but what I do if I live near one and want to walk?

All you would need for that is the traditional "Walk/Don't Walk" sign. Sensors will detect when you are at the intersection, and coordinate with all the autonomous vehicles to stop so you can walk. After they have all stopped, the Walk sign will light. No need for traffic lights. That is an easily solvable problem.

Respectfully. If they were true journalist they would do this. Unfortunately, we too often get hacks posing as journalists.

We, The Public, need to stop giving credit where credit is not due.

Put another way, if your pet barked would you call it a cat? Of course not, yet we allow hacks to pass themselves off as journalists. Such language abuse is Orwellian, at best.

I've really become exhausted at the first world default assumption that something is wrong if it's not a win-win situation. Is that not a part of the psychology of many who can't accept things like nuclear and natural gas as alternatives to arguably worse solutions because there are those tradeoffs? I agree that it would be great if journalists could move from win-win thinking to tradeoffs thinking, and that's a transition that globalized societies should move towards as well.

Another phrase for this concept is "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," something a lot of people struggle (or outright refuse) to understand.

Yes, exactly. And if one can't ever be satisfied with that, at least momentarily, then they are stuck in whataboutism hell.

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.

Does your opinion change if it's coupled with proper carbon capture and sequestration?

>> proper carbon capture and sequestration?

Just skip the burning step. Get electricity from sun/wind/nuclear and "sequester" the trash. New branding for landfills: "Early-cycle carbon sequestration and storage facilities". They could sell carbon credits for every ton of carbon they inter in their below-ground solid carbon storage facilities.

Maybe? Even clean plastic degrades eventually (although I don't have a sense of how the timelines compare with modern carbon sequestration approaches), and much of the waste is probably things that decompose into methane and/or CO2 much faster. Meanwhile, you're not going to get much solar power at the times of year when Sweden probably most needs energy generation.

The point is very well taken from other comments, though, that pollutants other than CO2 are probably also a significant concern even if CCS is, in isolation, up to the task.

On the other hand, temporary carbon sequestering is still way better than immediate release.

Now is not the time to burn trash. If you get carbon capture, we are better applying it to natural gas first (AKA, right now), and only extend it to trash once global warming is more under control.

I'm also skeptic about the rarer pollutants. How much mercury and lead are they throwing at the environment? (Surely, it's controlled, but how well is it controlled?) What else is on that trash? (That certainly isn't controlled.)

Proper trash recycling will probably use a burning stage once we get it. And I'm all for experiments on it. But I really don't think we currently have the tech to do it right, and the CO2 problem is a huge one right now.

What you say is true, but the alternative used by neighboring countries right now is that the garbage is buried in the ground while gas, oil and coal are produced or imported and burned in the place of trash.

Only if you're only looking at it from a co2 emissions perspective. If you consider other forms of air pollution and the sibling comment is correct[1], burning garbage is probably worse than burning coal. It's definitely worse than a natural gas power plant.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30957607

This is a only because we make things out of fossil fuel. When we stop doing that burning garbage will not be a problem.

Keep in mind that the burning often replace other forms of burning to generate power/heat. Until all power/heat generation is clean this will not matter.

For any country that has a coal or gas plant this will not increase emissions but will make dealing with hazardous material easier.

> 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 %.

I generally agree with all the points in that report, but note they are talking about US plants, located in minority areas, that regularly fail to meet the US standards for air quality, and don't seem particularly motivated to do so for whatever reason.

You can have crappy, low-tech, poorly-regulated coal plants / landfills / trash incinerators etc. that do worse than the average of examples of the same tech.

> note they are talking about US plants, located in minority areas,

The one plant I am directly familiar with is located in a rural, ~100% white area. The others may well be in minority areas.

> 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.

Proper landfill management includes capturing and burning that gas, that gets trapped there and is toxic if you let the pressure build up enough for it to escape.

And even better management is burning that for productive purposes (like running the garbage trucks)!

The methane largely comes from organic waste.

A good chunk of this organic waste can instead be composted.

The main benefit of composting, as I see it, isn't to enrich the soil of whatever, but to prevent greenhouse gas emissions from landfill.

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.

You generally have lots of layers of separation between trash and ground. Usually layers of clay and plastic.

https://www.epa.gov/landfills/municipal-solid-waste-landfill...

Being completely ignorant of the process, I don't understand how burning would possibly make it better. Let's say that you perfectly filter/capture bad stuff (and I'm extremely skeptical of both our ability to do it, and industry claims of our ability to do it). What do you do with it then... other than, put it in the ground / find some way to store it, and now we're back where we started?

I think a lot of us have this childhood mental image that "burning makes stuff go away". But it doesn't!

If you can capture and things like heavy metals or toxins, it's obviously going to be tiny amounts. Or - the amounts are the same but having a kg of cadmium in a jar is obviously easier to handle than a kg of cadmium dissolved in 20 tons of water.

Incineration replaces a large problem with a smaller one. Instead of having large amounts of bulk garbage, you get a smaller amount of hazardous waste. You need a much smaller landfill. You can also choose a location that minimizes the environmental impact, even if it's much farther away, because you don't have to worry so much about logistics.

But we all agree it doesn't disappear, right? Instead of large problem on the ground, I now have large problem in the air and small one on the ground.

What are the things that are easier to handle in the air than on the ground?

I feel either I am having a complete and utter intuitive misunderstanding of conservation of mass and stuff, or everybody else is :-D. I feel we are replacing stuff I can touch and move and cover and isolate and manage, with stuff that I now breathe in forever and lands in the water and on plants and people in a completely uncontrolled fashion. It did not magically go away somewhere, right? :-O

> 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!

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

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

if only, my sister was behind the recycling truck that just picked up at their house and saw it turn into the landfill.

> “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...

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 ...

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

Not if they are built and operated correctly.

Where do all the nasty fluorocarbons end up? As far as I can tell, the answer is that they're simply emitted out the smokestack and into the environment.

Fluorocarbons are extremely rare in household trash.

Please define "extremely rare". They're found in many products including dental floss, clothing, furniture, carpets, pizza boxes, fishing line, and only-God-knows-what-else.

It's certainly small as a mass fraction of household waste, let's say 0.01%. According to the article, European waste-to-energy plants burn 96 million tons of trash annually. So that's 9600 tons annually of fluorocarbon pollution, which will build up cumulatively in the environment because it effectively never breaks down.

That is a big family of chemical compounds, so it is not easy to give an easy answer.

I think that you are referring to a specific subset, fluoropolymers, also called "forever chemicals", like PTFE/Teflon/Goretex. They do not release in the air the most studied PFAS (like PFOA) under controlled condition, but more studies are needed to see if the same happens in commercially run incinerators.

What is the alternative? Landfill. PFAS are more concentrated in landfills, which accept non-incinerated ashes/waste.

What seems to be a valid general guideline for incineration? The higher the temperature, the better.

I found a nice report if you are interested: "Disposal of products and materials containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS): A cyclical problem"

One should remember that the comparison shouldn't necessarily be between burning trash and digging it down, so long as anything else would be burned instead of the trash, for energy. And that's (unfortunately) still the case at least some parts of the year for Sweden, i.e. that the renewable and nuclear doesn't completely cover the electricity/heating needs.

So the comparison in that situation is between on the one hand to burn trash, and on the other hand putting thash in a landfill and then burning fossil fuels.

Not at high temperature incineration with proper filters. Quite the contrary you get rid of a lot of the bad stuff.

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