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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Note this is just further, more detailed confirmation of stuff we already knew for a long time.

This is why landfill is, and always has been, near the bottom of the waste hierarchy, below even incineration with energy recovery.

People who sell fossil fuels have regularly argued that we should just bury trash and have lots of silly arguments as to why that is the case.

But the various recycling schemes used in EU, Singapore etc. are clearly better on basically every metric which isn't "sales of fossil fuels".

For the methane issue, seperate recycling of food, agricultural and other organic waste into biogas and fertilizer is the obvious solution. GHG negative methane!

Germany is a world leader in this, but even they can do more.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-technology-busines...

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Korea is another great example in recycling food waste. The country's food culture historically created a lot of food waste (although the total food waste had been reducing lately), and being a limited territory like Singapore, they recycle everything they can. Separating food waste is mandatory and you can get fined for not doing it. They use the recovered food waste as pig feed, compost and bio-gas.

https://earth.org/food-waste-south-korea/

Feeding pigs with food waste has a long tradition of course, in Eastern Europe many rural households still have one or two pigs just for this purpose, but in 2006 the EU banned that for commercial pig farming after outbreaks of Foot and Mouth Disease...

I didn't know about that. For me this is also an ethical issue. Raising a household pig and feeding it your own food waste and leftovers is fine, but when done on an industrial scale, for commercial purposes, we are bound to see regular abuse, possibly with sanitary consequences.

Why do you think that pigs fed on food waste are more likely to be abused than pigs fed other feed?

There are a lot of extras that appear happen in food waste i.e., plastics, paper etc.

In industrial settings this is not easy to filter out, so pigs end up consuming more of these non food waste products more than they would in small farms or feed-fed pigs.

There are many articles on the practice of hog garbage feeding recently

Composting of organic matter is not used for biogas and the plastic, when not sent to other countries, is burned. A lot of big cities have a "MVA".

I don't know what you are trying to say.

Organic matter is used to generate biogas and other useful things all over the world.

https://www.epa.gov/anaerobic-digestion/types-anaerobic-dige...

Burning plastic is, as I mentioned in my post, better than landfill if you use the energy for something and displace fossil fuels.

We don't really need to do that for much longer, since renewables are so cheap, so recycling is getting to be a better and better option and has been a good option for decades now.

Landfill has always been a last resort.

edit: figured out that with the reference to MVA you might have been saying that the US recycled too. They do, they don't do as much as they could and should because there's a lot of disinformation about it, but yes it's so obviously a good idea that even the US does it.

What I meant with reference to non US places was: recycle more and more stuff, don't moan and lie about it all the time, be an industrial leader not merely allow the US to get dragged kicking and screaming into saving money and improving people's health against the will of half the nation.

Burning plastic is only good if you capture the released CO2. Otherwise, I have a hard time imagining plastic is a more efficient fuel than most fossil fuels, meaning you release more CO2 for the same result when burning plastic.

To be clear, if what you have is just plastic, you should really be recycling it. If it's mixed solid waste and it's too late for that then...

> According to the Environmental Protection Agency, burning municipal solid waste emits nearly as much carbon per unit of energy as coal, and almost twice as much as natural gas.

And while gas is definately better than coal (due to burning clean, cheap to build, fast ramping) many estimates of methane leakage in the fossil fuel extraction process mean it could be (depending on how and where you source it) more than double the GHG impact than just the burn itself.

For me, the extra money diverted from the fossil fuel industry tips it in burnings direction, as long as sufficient effort is made to scrub the exhaust gas of toxins and if recycling wasn't clearly better.

Which it is. So we should do that instead.

I just see a lot of people saying it's worse than landfill, which it isn't.

Agreed. In addition I think people overestimate the CO2 produced by burning plastic. A plastic shopping bag is 6-8 grammes. Burning it produces about as much CO2 as driving a car 200 yards. If you pick a supermarket one mile further from your house because they have a better policy on plastic bags then the environment loses.

You can either pull oil out of the ground, make plastic of it and bury that plastic, where the decomposition will release greenhouse gases. Or you can burn it and capture the energy.

The difference in greenhouse gases isn't big - provided you burn it properly.

Except if burning the plastic is a replaceement for buring other kinds of fossil fie, in which case it's a win vs burying it.

I believe some landfills burn off the methane? I wonder how effective that is.

It's relatively common to capture it and use it in places where air pollution is taken serioisly (it also avoids the occaisiobal ecplosion). Definately worth doing if the landfill already exists, but much easier to keep the organic material seperate in the first place.

It's one of the remedies the paper mentions for the sites they identified

Methane goes away after 20 years. Carbon Dioxide stays around for thousands of years. We should spend 100% of our resources transitioning to extremely cheap sustainable electric energy.

That is the only option for turning the tide on climate

Not sure what you are arguing when you say methane “goes away”. It does not disappear, it reacts with oxygen in the atmosphere to become becomes carbon dioxide and water.

It becomes much less of a greenhouse gas, does that make more sense?

Your original statement was that carbon dioxide stays for thousands of years, methane goes away after twenty.

So the fact that "going away" in this context means "is replaced by carbon dioxide, which stays for thousands of years" seems a rather important part of the total warming potential of the two greenhouse gasses.

and what about everything else, from farting cows and crazy vulcans?

It's burps, not farts.

We will almost certainly soon be able to track cattle based emissions via satellite and use that to enforce usage of the various solutions we have (seaweed based food supplements apparently work) and/or price in the externality.

Here's some work on that from the same info source used for the above:

https://www.ghgsat.com/en/newsroom/cow-burps-seen-from-space...

And the fugitive methane from fracking? Or will we just blame the farm that was fracked under without consent which had its bore water ruined?

I agree with your second statement but your first is a bit ambigous.

Methane is a much more potent GHG than Carbon (about 8-30x), and is a big chunk of the emissions (about 20%).

In fact after 20 years of being worse than carbon dioxide, it mostly turns into carbon dioxide and then hangs around for millenia, meaning it is categorically worse.

>it mostly turns into carbon dioxide and then hangs around for millenia, meaning it is categorically worse.

This too is inaccurate. CO2 has a half-life in the atmosphere variously stated between 27 and 49 years.

If the world magically went zero Co2 today, The atmospheric levels would decrease about 2.5%/yr

1000 years is definately a figure I've seen bandied about by NASA, and the Bern model suggests that some percentage is effectively permanent, so millenia doesn't seem outlandish.

Where are you citing your numbers from?

A quick Google suggests it's a Climate Change Denial source:

http://euanmearns.com/the-half-life-of-co2-in-earths-atmosph...

And even they cite the climate scientists as saying hundreds of years (before going on to prove them wrong in their blog post of course):

> We hear all the time form the climate science community that even if we stop burning fossil fuels (FF) today the CO2 we have already produced will still be in the atmosphere for centuries to come. We have already lit a long slow burning fuse that will lead us to climate Armageddon. How much of this is actually true?

You can find the numbers in the IPCC reports.

Headline numbers like 1,000s of years are are always talking about about a fraction of emitted CO2.

Like radiation, CO2 Decay has an infinite tail. When it is "gone" depends on how much you are talking about (50%, 90%, 99.9% ect)

CO2 decay is complicated because there are several removal pathways, and some cap out, and some keep going.

The IPCC doesn't talk about it in terms of half-life because it isn't true exponential decay. The 2007 Report said the following:

"Carbon dioxide cycles between the atmosphere, oceans and land biosphere. Its removal from the atmosphere involves a range of processes with different time scales. About 50% of a CO2 increase will be removed from the atmosphere within 30 years, and a further 30% will be removed within a few centuries. The remaining 20% may stay in the atmosphere for many thousands of years" * More recent reports essentially provide an asterisk that says its complicated.

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar4-wg1-chap...

The carbon cycle is complex and simple half life numbers are always wrong. A lot of the carbon we emit is removed from the atmosphere relatively quickly, for example into the biosphere or into the oceans. But the only way to "permanently" get rid of it is by sequestering it into the lithosphere. These processes take geological time. Until they are complete the equilibrium concentration in the atmosphere is larger than before we burned that piece of coal. So it is relatively accurate that some of the carbon we emit stays in the atmosphere "forever".

I completely agree. Certainly you would also agree that the following statement is misleading at best.

>it mostly turns into carbon dioxide and then hangs around for millenia, meaning it is categorically worse.

It's also useful though. Capturing it means we can use it.

Transitioning to sustainable electricity is necessary but not sufficient, we also need to address methane, cement and steel production, and a bunch of other things. Regarding the urgency of methane in particular: https://climateer.substack.com/p/aerosols

The people involved in recycling infrastructure are usually not qualified to build wind turbines or electrolyzers, so I think we can safely do 100% of both.

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