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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, landfills are not major environmental problems, AFAIK, but they offend the neat freak within all of us.

And, as you say, they're pretty good carbon deposits, which is supposed to be The Most Important Thing.

I think the main problem is that the average Joe/Jane confuses all types of pollution as equally bad. The real, most imminent threat is really CO2. That's what we have to spend the most money/energy on, because it could have absolutely catastrophic consequences in the next few decades.

Plastic in a landfill is just... Stuck there. It's unnatural, sure, but it's not immensely harmful, not nearly on the same scale as CO2, and realistically, in the future, we'll be able to mine it out of there and refine it into something usable if we need it.

Garbage is also a problem in the environment like plastics in oceans, but the problem is not enough (well run and used) land fills (in Asia) not too many!

50% of the plastic problem in the ocean is discarded fishing nets (generally accepted to be discarded from Asian fishing vessels).

Source?

looks more like 10% [0]. but it depends on where in the ocean you're talking about - they float more easily than a lot of plastic, and so are caught the pacific gyre.

[0] https://www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/publication/ghost-gear-t...

A more accurate claim: 46% of the mass of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is fishing nets.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w

Plastic pollution of oceans is much much bigger problem than just pacific garbage patch.

The real threat is the nearly 1 trillion tons of toxic waste we're racking up PER YEAR. It's the most lethal stuff this planet has ever encountered.

If the CO2 levels spike, life on the planet (including many or maybe even most humans) will survive. If you look at historic levels, they were hundreds of times higher and the planet was the greenest it has ever been.

If/when that toxic waste leaks out and starts killing, NOTHING will survive.

I haven’t heard this before. What kinds of toxic waste are you talking about?

Radioactive, dangerous chemical, ...

And the thing is that these are actually harming the people who are near the area where they are disposed, so the harm is more direct. CO2 is more like a global problem, so not as worrisome for the local population.

You're still not saying what it is that you're talking about.

The best thing to do for both of those is shut down coal plants; the emissions from those are terrible for health and they’re even radioactive too.

The area around Chernobyl is very green and many animals live there. Things survive..

> The area around Chernobyl is very green and many animals live there. Things survive..

Only if you're talking about Putin's Little Green Men, in which case most were last seen heading to their deathbed in Belarus after having exposed themselves to deadly levels radiation after occupying the area and trenching it, to the total dismay of local Ukrainians and Plant workers!

Life does indeed find a way, but not in the way most think.

> In a way radioactivity is one of the easiest contaminants to deal...

What an absurd statement, if that were the case you'd go live and work in Fukushima and take advantage of all the open area and low cost real estate, and all the plentiful food that comes from that region.

Radiation to this day still hasn't been cleaned up in Chernobyl, which happened almost 40 years ago, and an Evacuation Zone is still in place.

And by the way their is an ongoing fire in the area as we speak that is cause for concern [0].

0: https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/russia-ukraine-cris...

No one said safe for humans for hundreds of years. But life survives..

In a way radioactivity is one of the easiest contaminants to deal with: Instant, contact-free testing for levels is trivial with cheap, handheld devices, compared to virtually all other toxic substances which usually require taking samples and analyzing them in a lab. Decay is very well understood and easy to characterize.

"decarbonization" is a bad term. CO2 is the problem.

Don't forget methane! It is 80x more potent (eventually degrading to CO2 in the atmosphere)

We leak it all over the place, with no plans to plug the holes. Instead we keep adding new piping all over.

Sperm counts have been dropping for a long time (50%-60% over the past 50 years) without stopping, and plasticizers are the suspected culprit. It's incredible how many people need to do IVF now. I would argue that might be the most imminent threat but nobody seems to care.

People should have fewer kids anyway, I see this as an absolute win.

Speaking as someone that had to go through IVF, that's a bit like celebrating cancer for reducing the population. Infertility is devastating for you and your relationship when you want to have children.

Don't expect empathy from someone who has found the Rightful Cause(TM).

You have my sympathies for going through a this procedure even though I never had to do that.

Infertility would be "none", and I didn't say that, I said "fewer".

But I'm sorry you've put such an important emphasis on having kids in your relationship. The fact that you live in a society where that's reasonable is immensely sad, to me.

You should feel whole without children, and the fact that you don't is the real tragedy, IMO.

Are you always this misanthropic and belittling?

I'm neither of those things now, nor am I always anything.

Are you always this antagonistic and reductive?

When someone infantilizes or shames people for their suffering, yes.

Considering I did neither of those things, your behavior remains unexplained...

Large majority of developed countries are below replacement rates, so there's no need to gloat in the suffering and pain of people who can't have children.

What an anti-human stance.

Why yes, just commit demographic suicide à la Japan.

> Sperm counts have been dropping for a long time

Every couple of years this concern bubbles up. It seems to be established that sperm counts in males are going down. But I’ve yet to see substantial evidence about the possible causes. The effect of plasticisers e.g. were found in animal models usually with rather high doses. An increase of obesity over the last 50 years might also be a likely cause as obesity is linked with hormonal issues. Furthermore, the average age of first time parents has increased significantly. That could also explain why IVF got more popular as sperm counts (and egg „quality“) are age dependent as well.

AFAIK there is no empirical study today proving any link between environmental issues and sperm counts.

I'm certainly no expert, but from what I've seen the scientists are pretty firm in their belief it has nothing to do with obesity or other societal factors. Most of those are fairly easy to control for.

Apparently it's happening in dogs too: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160809095138.h...

But not necessarily in farm animals.

We know for a fact that phthalates have an effect on embryo development, and good luck avoiding those.

Just to remind everyone, the decline in sperm count is across species, not just in humans.

So while yes, for people it may be less of an issue, the same cannot be said for wildlife, where it becomes another nail in the extinction coffin.

The need to do IVF is also related to women marrying and choosing to have children later.

Well, it's easy to say if you don't live near one.

But if you do, the smell, view, and fact that ground water becomes undrinkable will convern you. Not to mention the space they take, where little life can live on.

In the USA, you have a huge space, including deserts, so a landfill may be out of most human reach. But in France, landfills can't be far, and take the place of either a forest, or accomodations.

We don't have a better way to deal with the huge amount of trash than landfills for now. But reducing the number or size of them would be a nice to have.

I don't mean it should be a priority compared to most urging issues like climate change, but let's not get too comfy with it either.

I wouldn't go that far.

> Per the most recent Inventory Report, U.S. landfills released an estimated 109.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) of methane into the atmosphere in 2020; this represents 16.8 percent of the total U.S. anthropogenic methane emissions across all sectors.

https://www.epa.gov/lmop/frequent-questions-about-landfill-g....

Sure. That's almost all due to food waste, though. FWIW.

https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/sustainable-...

Yes, for that reason Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley) is pushing hard to divert food waste out of the garbage and get it composted instead: it's supposed to go in with yard waste, not the regular trash. Not sure how successful this is as it counts on people putting things in the correct bin.

Here in the UK you can actually be fined for putting food waste in the regular bin (although that depends on where you live and enforcement is spotty).

There is a program like that in some suburbs of Sydney. We get little green bags for compostable waste. The up take has been ok from what I’ve seen but these are affluent suburbs.

We are now able to do this here in suburban Los Angeles. You can now put your food waste in the bin meant for green waste (lawn clippings)

As a county resident, I also started doing this recently, and I am amazed how much organic waste we were throwing away previously. My regular trash can takes much longer to fill, and I am constantly taking out the little kitchen bin (that was provided by the waste company).

Diverting compostables out of the regular trash stream also makes the regular trash stream not stink. My under counter trash bin can go two weeks easy without stinking up the place. It is mostly plastic that can't be recycled.

Composting is good, but it's heavy and hence energy inefficient if it's transported too far. This goes for almost all waste but the amount of water in compost and the transport distance adds upp. Handling waste and composting as local as possible is important.

The US sends millions of tons of trash to China, India, and other places. Perhaps it would be better for places to implement local sorting (glass, plastic, paper, etc.) and composting- as many other nations do as opposed to disposing of all trash in the same containers and shipping the problem off for someone else to deal with. But even better would be to generate less trash in the first place or at least have an attempt at transitioning to using biodegradable packaging. Packaging, which also is excessive and unecessary in the first place, like items in layers of plastic casing, plastic boxes, plastic wrapping, and so on when there are ways of distributing goods without convenient prepackaging in favor of instead refilling reusable containers or utilizing materials such as fabric, glass, or others which can be repurposed and reused more flexibly and reliably than plastic.

Not even going to get into plastics being contaminated by toxic things and leeching chemicals. Landfills are not harmless to ecosystems and aquifers, either- they're a short term way of not dealing with the issue of waste materials, at best.

> Yeah, landfills are not major environmental problems

... yet?

Is there enough raw material on earth for landfills to become major environmental problems? (genuinely curious)

Maybe this makes me sounds like a jerk, but:

All material that can end up in landfills is already on Earth.

Depends what you mean by "major environmental problem". Landfills aren't going to singlehandedly cause anthropogenic climate change, but they contribute significantly to it, and a poorly sealed landfill leaching its contents into the local water table can cause some pretty drastic problems with the local environment

How are they worse than any alternative? If I dump my food waste in the garden, is that emitting less GHG than letting it decompose in a landfill?

Is it that it comes out as methane from landfills but less harmful CO2 from a little pile? That should be solved by flaring the methane.

If you are worried about space i recommend that you look at the surface area of earth and the volume of space that’s accessible to us underneath the surface.

What would cause them to be an environmental issue? As far as I know they can be built in a safe manner and there is plenty of space for them.

In the Western world maybe, but outside of it... hell even in the Western world we have regular reports of mismanagement and corruption, just look at Italy.

We need to reduce the amount of trash we produce, not hope for a miracle technology.

Landfills are not a miracle technology. They exist already and are technologically sound. It’d be way more of a miracle if we somehow managed to greatly reduce waste.

How sustainable are landfills? There's limited land for farming, residences, manufacturing, and everything else we use it for. And trucking trash to deserts to landfill there isn't carbon neutral either. Trash also doesn't breakdown as quickly in covered landfills (for better or worse depending on what one dumps).

Given the yield of useful content vs. rock in mining, I suspect the more limiting factor is space for all the mining, not space for disposal of the 0.1% metal etc yield for making industrial goods.

People love to "what if" landfills. Best to not bother arguing with them. We have tons of problems with emissions, plastics pollution, industrial dumping. However landfills ain't one of them, but people won't give up. I've learned to not bother discussing anything with them if they don't know a few basics of how modern landfills are run (at least in western nations).

As others have mentioned they are a major source of methane emission, though this can be addressed (do a better job separating out food waste and compost it).

Landfills were demonized for a long time because they were easy targets.

It's usually just disguised NIMBY-ism :)

The thing about nimbyism in this case is that confortable commentators on hackernews are vanishingly unlikely ever to have to live near one. This is a poor people problem.

There’s a famous landfill right in Silicon Valley though; it’s caused Milpitas to smell like rotten eggs for the last 20 years.

https://sf.curbed.com/2019/3/19/18273029/milpitas-odor-studi...

Correct, landfills are not a miracle technology. Landfills leak.

https://www.clf.org/blog/all-landfills-leak-and-our-health-a...

https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-040-03/

Most landfills contain icky things like heavy metals or arsenic. Having that leak into an aquifer Would Be Bad.

That’s why they’re sealed with clay and plastic and constantly monitored for leakage.

If it needs constant monitoring it's a potential problem... And at some point it will happen... We know that from ages of software development, if it can fail, it will fail at some point.

You’d be surprised by the number of things that need to be constantly monitored. Building structures, power plants, roads, dams, mass transit, etc. basically everything.

Dams break and wreck havoc on ecosystems, the US has had it's fair share of coal mine sludge disasters. Even countries with strict environmental agencies and long history of mining have accidents.

So what's your solution? Stop building dams and decommission the ones that have been built? Humans attempt to create order. The universe naturally wants to increase disorder. It's natural that anything we create will need to be monitored.

We know that dams are dangerous and that they fail, the smaller ones are decomissioned when not in use not only to improve the ecosystem. A dam is not designed for a life of a 100 thousands years, it's a long time.

Or those of us who don't like microplatics in our fish, water, and bodies

Those microplastics aren't coming from landfills. They're coming from your everyday interactions with plastic and people dumping plastic in rivers and oceans.

Maybe not the landfills once they are buried. But certainly from waste transfer stations or unburied waste, seagulls and other birds will pick up trash because it smells like food or may have some food in it, and then drop it outside of the landfill/transfer station.

If you don't like microplastics, then you should be pro landfill.

A very large fraction of those are from plastic waste in Asian countries that gets dumped into waterways instead of being landfilled.

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