Much US “recycling” goes straight to the landfill
futurism.com
futurism.com
Also, most of the ocean plastic comes from a small number of rivers in the less developed world. [1] Rich countries aren't really the problem.
While we should try to reduce waste as much as possible. This is far more effective at the front end of the process when they're designed and produced, the vast amount of carbon is from direct carbon from production and follow on carbon from the carbon intensity of the products under use.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plas...
On the other hand, a quick Google search turns up quotes like "the US is on pace to run out of room in landfills within 18 years"
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/us-landfills-are-fi...
So which is it?
Whilst the US has a lot of people. its also really big. It's got space to solve this problem.
And shipping solid waste halfway across the country simply isn't economically feasible. How many Americans are willing to pay hundreds of dollars a month for their trash service?
Building new landfills in the eastern states will necessarily mean building them in someone's backyard. There's no place in the eastern states that is truly unpopulated.
A coal train carries 13500 tons of coal.
So that would be 21111 trains a year, or 50 trains a day - if we moved ALL the garbage.
The stretch between North Platte and O'Fallons, NE is the busiest main freight line in the US, seeing about 120-140 UP trains a day.
So we can do it. We could train all the US garbage somewhere. We have the power.
The only places I've ever seen with "nobody living nearby" were in western states: Utah, Arizona, etc. It's not economical to ship trash from NY to AZ.
Trash service -- whether paid directly (as in the suburbs) or rolled into taxes (as in the city) -- frequently isn't cheap. It's usually somewhere around $50/month, for basic, once-a-week pickup of a large rolling can that holds 2-3 'contractor'/32 gallon bags of trash.' Trash collection employees also make pretty decent money, for manual labor (as they should.)
Sorry, no: trash from any American city is trucked a relatively short distance to a nearby landfill. It might be a county or two away (i.e., not exactly next door), but it certainly isn't half a continent away.
People talk about fake news, but this sort of stuff (which is fake news also) damages credibility immensely.
There's plenty of evidence everywhere, though not all of it supports their Neo-Malthusian impulse, which is their true pain and cause.
Local man has no idea what he’s going to have for lunch next Saturday! …so?
Guess what! Nobody builds a landfill for the fun of it, so they wait until they need one.
If the rubbish starts piling up, in the US or elsewhere, then all three of those issues are going to be quickly ignored in favour of digging another hole and adding the bare minimum of leachate collection.
>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.
>[...]
>GONZALEZ: OK. Here's what else was happening at the time. Yes, landfills were closing, but that was because there were new rules for landfills - stricter rules to protect the environment. The EPA said you now have to do things like line the bottom of landfills with plastic so they don't contaminate the groundwater.
>KINNAMAN: And so the old town dump - every little town had one - was out of compliance. You can't accept garbage in here anymore. It's illegal. And so these town dumps were closing by the dozens.
>GONZALEZ: But in their place, regional landfills were becoming a thing - bigger landfills that could accept trash while still following all of these new rules. The Natural Resources Defense Council says there used to be about 10,000 dumps in the mid-'80s and that now we have less than 3,000. But we were not running out of space then, and we still aren't running out of space. Thomas says we probably have thousands of years of landfill space left in the U.S. And even hardcore environmentalists reluctantly agree that, yeah, we have a lot of space left. But people thought we were running out of space, and that was what mattered.
>KINNAMAN: And so the recycling era was born. This is when state government said, we're going to require cycling to - recycling to occur.
I guess this depends on your tax bracket and political bargaining power. I grew up smelling (and smelling like) solid waste trucked in from the waste treatment facility for the richer suburbs in a racially segregated metro area. The less PC way of sating that is "concentrated rich 95% white person shit".
And let me tell you: despite what they think, MD/JD/MBA shit does not smell like roses. The smell permeated the entire community for days at a time, every month. I also now have a whole set of recommended annual cancer screenings. All from a modern and well regulated landfill that is still in operation.
I shit you not: we had movie days in high school that corresponded with the worse smelling days. Just whole days/weeks of lost learning, regularly, because the whole place smelled like literal human shit.
Now I live in a snow white upper middle class suburb and those problems are behind me, but I'm still very conscious about where my waste really ends up and have gone to war in more than city council meeting about where our literal shit ends up.
But, again, if you have a FAANG salary then your shit and trash will be shipped to someone else's community and it's not your problem. Waste away! /s
It definitely should be regulated to not offgas like that, but we can/should solve those problems. It wouldn't even be that hard - probably like $10-50M or so.
We need to address the lack of true democratic representation in those communities allows those problems to persist. It's not because of lack of tech or finance.
I'm shocked humans are allowed to live there. Nothing that smells that bad could possibly be safe.
Also that whole area is a liquefaction zone, so when the earthquake happens, I'm sure it'll be a bio-hazard disaster.
If it was just a few years in your 20s you're probably fine (per the EPA, but maybe also screen).
Also, another thing to think about it is that your parents likely picked the best place available for their means. Not many people choose to live next to landfills if they can afford something better. Had the landfill not existed, your parents would have likely needed to live next to some other type of hazard. It’s unfortunate, but a reality of our economic system.
I know you didn't mean it that way, but it can sound extraordinarily tone-deaf to talk down to people like this.
I thought OP was making an interesting point about economics, personally - that there's sort of a law of "conservation of unpleasantness" in a market economy, and if it wasn't the landfill, there would be some other thing objectionable about your property. You approach your career very differently (and by capitalist standards, usually more successfully) if you figure that you're going to dislike some things anyway, but might as well be deliberate in choosing what you dislike.
To be clear, I'm exaggerating for comedic effect here, not accusing.
It'd be great if our society could move past those two sides of the same coin to a more "oh, look, here's an area where people are getting screwed, maybe we can fix that". That's a kind of problem-solving attitude focused on people, not a popularity contest.
Yes, it's my parent's fault for being poor. (Actually, not poor, just not upper middle class in the wrong metro, although most of my colleagues from university onwards called it "working class" so maybe so.) Unfortunate, but reality :-|
Managing a landfill/sewage plant can be worthwhile.
The vast majority of our problems are, we just continue to refuse to solve them because some rich asses will be slightly less rich if we do.
That reference isn't exactly justifying your statement. AFAICT that research is just comparing the relative amounts of plastic going to the ocean _from rivers_. Rivers are not the only way that plastic gets into the ocean.
Most of the ocean plastic is actually from fishing gear...so if you want to reduce ocean plastics your best bet is probably to stop eating so much fish: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/great-pac...
Eh, we ship a lot of waste overseas and we delocalised a lot of industries there too. Rich countries are definitely part of the problem, it's too easy to say we don't have a role in this and point our fingers to Asia and Africa... it's time to start taking responsabilities
Since there must be losers, people don't want to be a 80% winner and 20% loser, they want to be a 100% winner and let a whole person be a 100% loser instead.
Any policy that aims at eliminating poverty has to ensure that supply and demand are in balance.
The following year, in 2019, The Guardian stated that Greenpeace said most ocean pollution comes from "ghost gear", dumped fishing gear, not rivers in Asia.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-f...
Its all so tiring.
I don't have a source for this, so take it for what it's worth, but as I recall rich countries remain a significant part of the problem. TFA mentions it, but, iirc, the US used to ship its plastic waste to China for recycling, but the "single stream" approach to recycling resulted in a contaminated waste stream that was more expensive to handle. So China stopped accepting our recyclable waste. In turn, we started shipping our recyclables to Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries instead. They're happy for the business, but they don't have the infra to handle the amount of waste we're sending, and general mismanagement is widely recognized [0]. As a result US plastic waste intended for "recycling" ends up in dump sites, landfills, etc. in SEA countries and eventially accumulates in rivers, sewers, and eventually the ocean.
I don't disagree with you regarding landfills. There was a post here recently that seemed to lean more towards just throwing plastic away, that way it ends up in a landfill, rather than "recycling" it and having it end up in the ocean by way of the Philippines
[0] https://www.pemsea.org/publications/reports/reducing-plastic...
A lot of the problematic plastic comes from fishing.
It's only been in the last year that things are sort of coming back, but landfilling happens for almost all plastics and paper products, unless your muni does multi-bin sorting and not single-stream.
Now that petroleum is more expensive, maybe plastic recycling will make a resurgence, but I'm not holding my breath.
Recycling boils down to a really really really big and messy sorting problem, and hopefully someone clever can come up with 0-marginal effort waste bins that handle the sorting so Americans can remain lazy and provide a pre-sorted pickup for recyclers.
Multi-stream recycling at the source yields the lowest contamination and best recapture rates for material. [2]. The single-stream wave worked when china bought everything, but now that material quality matters, the volume benefits from single-stream are now a liability.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_National_Sword 2 - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-era-of-easy-recycli...
If the answer is “too expensive to pay people to sort”, then maybe I’d argue that recycling is a terrible economic idea: isn’t it certainly more expensive in lost productivity for untrained people to puzzle over bin types, than for trained people to sort after that fact?
Having worked on machines at landfills, I learned much recycling is a scam to make people feel good. Separated items in well-run scrap sites do get recycled, though that is the exception.
The landfill cells are not cheap to construct though it is straightforward.
In some States with tire reclamation fees to prevent disposal of whole tires, the fees pay for the dump to buy a shredder, stacker, and wheel loader to gradually sprinkle smaller tire pieces into the same place the whole tire would have gone.
After seeing many of these sites, I have concluded that burning most trash to make electricity would be appropriate.
It’s pretty cheap to make stuff at scale.
Cleaning something to the point it can be reused safely (without knowing what the prior person did to it), or disassembling something damaged or broken to the point it can be melted down and recycled, is really hard and time consuming.
About the only things it makes sense to do this with are stuff made out of highly valuable metals, or are very large (aka big pieces), or where we don’t mind burning the non-recyclable stuff most of the time (aka crushed cars).
This holds as long as you pay people, but I doubt many folks would jump on slavery as a solution to our environmental woes.
It seems like we are missing some costs in our calculations.
That labor is not going to be able to keep producing stuff if their environment is wrecked. So what’s the cost of that?
https://www.cnex.tw/plasticchina
I highly suspect that recycling is in fact a terrible economic idea, and it's not at all cost effective to have people sort their garbage so it can be recovered for materials worth pennies anyway. The problem is that you cannot generally tell civilized affluent consumers that their consumption habits are going to turn this planet into the world of Wall-E, without them insisting we do something about this. The real product being sold was the myth of a sustainable future, just as it is with most other industries.
But another part is just the sheer volume of material. There's no time to do manual sorting other than basic visual inspection to make sure things like bowling balls and concrete get to the sorters.
Optical sorters are incredibly cool, but only just now getting to a place where they can work fast enough and accurate enough to make a difference [3]. Separating the material apart gives the machines the best shot at sorting; less work they'll need to do. Even if humans only get 80% of the sorting right at collection, it's significantly better than no sorting at all, as it gives the machines time to pick and blow the material to proper channels for recovery and resale.
See [1] [2] for videos of NYC recycling plants to see the scale. Videos don't do it justice, and when you tour different plants, it puts the complexity of the problem into perspective.
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ivu0HCdqEHs 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIHGKZL8_6Q 3 - https://www.recyclingproductnews.com/article/35841/the-lates...
No, it boils down to companies actually putting in some goddamned effort to use actually fucking recyclable and recycled materials. Anything else is a goddamned side show.
A large portion of "recycling" sent to China was actually landfilled or incinerarted in China. So it mostly "killed" us sending off our waste to somewhere else pretending we were recycling it. Single stream didn't actually "work" even when we sent it to China -- the Chinese government just thought the amount of money we paid them to landfill or incinerate plastic and other solid waste (after shipping it 7000 miles!) while pretending to recycle it was worth the environmental consequences to them, until they didn't.
> According to the report from two American advocacy groups, The Last Beach Cleanup and Beyond Plastics, American recycling statistics counted exported plastic waste as “recycled”, despite the reality that, once they left US shores, they were more likely to be burned or dumped than recycled. The US plastics recycling rate peaked at 9.5 per cent in 2014, and a large chunk of that was exported to China.…
> China imported 8.88 million tons of plastic waste before the ban, and a January 2021 study in Nature Communications, a peer-reviewed journal, found that 70.6 per cent of this waste was either buried or mismanaged…
> “After China’s 2018 ban, countries found other destinations to send their waste to, which did not have as strict regulations as China. The same problems that caused China to stop importing plastic waste were then transferred to other countries,” she said.
https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/environment/article...
Putting plastic in a landfill sequesters carbon, has less emissions in transportation, and doesn’t require paying people to sort it (ultimately born by us chumps paying extra to recycle it - if recycling were truly worth it, they’d be paying us to take it away, or at least discount our garbage service for separating out plastics). Landfills already have mitigations in place for groundwater contamination since landfills can have much more harmful things than micro plastics seep out of them.
Not to mention all the micro labor involved in cleaning plastic, and in sorting it for people who aren’t lucky enough to have single stream recycling. Maybe it makes some people feel good but it seems like a distraction and waste of time just to make an unviable activity slightly more viable (if plastic recycling were actually viable this would be centralized since it’s more efficient).
I completely support recycling for materials like aluminum and glass that make sense to recycle, but recycling plastic has never made sense economically, and putting it in a landfill isn’t that bad.
Anyways, I’d prefer we taxed the crap out of single-use packaging to properly account for the waste handling over time.
https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/recycling-trash/gl...
When will people recognize that government is really really bad at solving problems. How is that war on drugs going anyway?
The war on drugs is a completely different situation.
My understanding was that there isn't any facility that can economically handle the glass anywhere in the region. So it just wasn't affordable to do anything other than crush it.
People could do far more to 'save the planet' by keeping their house at 65F in the Winter and 78F in the Summer, but that doesn't have the same virtuous feel as campaigning to ban 'evil' single-use plastics. Nobody will see you shiver/sweat in your house, so there's nothing to brag about.
I don't agree with it entirely but I did like that it was an realistic approach to a complex problem.
Recycling plastic is a non-solution to a much bigger problem: over-consumption of plastics.
The only way I see forward is for governments to implement policies that discourage use of plastics by consumers and manufacturers. Some places have done this with plastic bags, but need to do it for plastic single-use bottles, etc.
Diabetus.
- They are often quite economically produced, and only require a small amount of plastic.
- They are likely reused, often as trash can liners.
- As long as we bury them in appropriate landfills, then the carbon in the bag goes back into the ground. (See other comments on the myth of landfill space running out.)
- Manufacturing cloth tote bags has a carbon footprint 20,000 times higher than a plastic bag. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/style/cotton-totes-climat...
- Furthermore, cloth tote bags hold bacteria and are unhygienic for carrying groceries. Washing the bags cost electricity/water and probably not carbon neutral either.
It's also not about how much plastic is used to create the plastic bags, it's how much environmental pollution is created from the bags.
Indeed, I don't know anyone who doesn't reuse the free plastic bags they get from stores, even if it's only a single reuse.
The other thing to note is that plastic bags are naturally waterproof. You can even wash (more like rinse) them if you so desire, but they also don't tend to attract dirt, unlike the woven types.
I wish they had a propane tank model instead: I buy reusable bag credits. At the checkout, my items are bagged from a supply of clean reusable bags, and that number is deducted from my credits (if I need more, I can instantly buy them). When I return to the store, I bring my bags back to the bag return where the bags will be laundered in bulk in commercial machines.
Organic cotton bags have some kind of footprint 20,000 times higher than a plastic bag.
For climate impact specifically, you have to reuse a cotton bag 52 times. And an organic cotton bag 149 times. The really big numbers are based on things like ozone impact and fertilizer runoff, which are worth considering but should be taken in comparison with daily life and not just plastic bags.
Source? My impression was that china was buying the recycling from us[1]. Sure, some of that was not recycleable and ended up getting burned/landfilled/dumped in a river, but they weren't intending on just landfilling it.
At this point, there is pretty much only one material that is actually recycled, because it is easy and profitable to do so: aluminum. We should eb enouraging manufacturers to adopt either aluminum or cardboard for all their packaging (the latter is not recyclable in practice, but at least is sequesters carbon). By encourage, I mean ban plastic packaging outright or impose draconian taxes on it.
There’s a cycle of waste where cheap goods break but its okay because its cheap. Instead we could be making things that last.
You can't both build things that can be infinitely fixable and sell a steady stream of them.
Durability is a competitive advantage that businesses and individuals will often clamor for. It’s not easy to replicate
Hence why I advocate for taxing plastics
Name one.
Higher end TVs (so, Sony, LG, Samsung)
iPhones last something like 7-8 years in an industry where things last 3, max
*several* power tool and manual tool brands
Basically any company that works with real leather.
Victorinox
Kitchen Aide
Word travels for basically all high quality products. They also cost like they’re high quality.
Am pleased with the dishwasher and range from them. But the microwave electronics went out, so now I go with a cheap microwave.
Sadly, anything other appliance branded KitchenAid is basically hit-or-miss. They license their name to other manufacturers for certain products, so you can’t count on the name on its own to guarantee quality.
As opposed to not transferring the cost when they're forced to use glass bottles or whatever? Plastic is used because it's cheap. Switching to alternatives would undoubtedly cost more money.
>We have a CRV tax for each bottle/can here in California, and as far as I can tell, it has no affect on consumer behavior.
Maybe this says something about the effectiveness of plastic bottles? If consumers/companies are still choosing plastic bottles even though they have to pay the disposal costs, maybe this means that plastic bottles are better as a whole and we shouldn't be trying to force a switch to alternatives?
It is a distraction so the packaging industry can fill the earth with garbage whilst we feel OK about it.
I'm so deeply indoctrinated to believe the recycling lie that I continue to sort my garbage despite believing it all just gets dumped into landfill.
That's different from aluminum can recycling or paper recycling. Those are made into raw aluminum billets or pulp to be manufactured again.
And then you name one material that is recycled and ignore the rest, most of which are highly effective. It's called cherry-picking and it's a bad look.
Criticize people's ideas and leave them out of it. It's a basic courtesy that keeps the community healthy.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/17/uk-plast...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/may/16/uk-ewast...
https://www.greenpeace.org/africa/en/blogs/11125/africas-exp...
Basically recycling companies pay to export the waste to poor countries who simply dump or burn it instead of recycling it.
For this reason I avoid plastic and stick to cardboard, glass and aluminium. Fortunately plastic is extremely unfashionable in the UK right now and products are increasingly switching to card or aluminium instead.
It was a move from the plastics industry to push a feel-good policy, but is likely not doing as much good as many of us think.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/plastic-wars/
It's very simple: If you have to pay to recycle things, it's a failure. If they pay you, it works.
China used to buy plastic recycling from the US (it was never just shipped for disposal, China actually paid for it). For a while they actually wanted it because they could use it to make new stuff. But it become uneconomical (too labor intensive), and they stopped.
Metal: You have people hunting for metal, and going through bins for it. i.e. it's good to recycle.
Cardboard: Same thing.
Everything else? Don't recycle it. Burn the plastic for energy, and bury everything else. Sweden actually buys garbage from other countries to burn for energy. Since they are paying for the item, this works just fine.
I don't see why paying wouldn't work.
Western landfills are amazing technology that affordably and safely lock away garbage. Most of the land can be reclaimed for parks or golf courses or other public spaces.
Recycling programs often end in plastics being sent to Asian landfills which are little more than open dumps susceptible to rain, flooding, and contributing to the Pacific garbage patch.
Perhaps in an older landfill it could be denser, and maybe it could be easier to sort after other materials have started to break down. Still doubt it would be very economical yet. But I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes economical someday.
I do wonder if it may be possible to sort more of the aluminum out on its way in to the landfill rather than trying to do it after the fact. It was something like $6B worth of aluminum landfilled based on the 2018 numbers.
I was also curious about separating efficiently and went down a rabbit hole on Eddy Current Separators. High speed rotating alternating magnets I guess can influence non-ferrous materials like aluminum. [2]
[1] https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiehuIugYE0
While we're on this topic, does anyone have info regarding what happens to the plastic bags I return to my local (CA, US) grocery store collection bin? Are they part of a separate stream?
I add all sorts of used plastic bags to that bin (thin produce bags, the more heavy-duty grocery bags, Amazon padded shipping envelopes, deflated shipping air bags, clean zip lock bags, etc.). I also wonder if I'm gumming up the works by putting different types of plastic bags in the bin because most bags don't have recycle markings/numbers.
Putting things in recycling that aren't explicitly accepted by your local facility is bad. Never put things in that aren't marked, and definitely not thin unmarked stuff. It increase the costs by gumming up processing equipment if they try to do something with it. And likely does just shunt the whole section over to the landfill. Although most of the stuff probably ends up there anyways. Same thing with greasy pizza boxes, they just taint the load.
Then I found out that, for each carbon bound up in a piece of plastic, a half-dozen are released to the atmosphere in doing that. Thus, for each bit of plastic not recycled, so much more is made from scratch, and that much more CO2 enters the atmosphere. (Presumably, recycling involves energetic processing, but less.) In the future, when the energy used in processing comes more from renewables, will balances shift?
Shale oil, by the way, is equally evil. For each carbon extracted and delivered, four or five are burnt in extracting it.
2017 film 'Plastic China' trailer
Are we talking about actual slavery, or run of the mill "developing country with poor labor standards"?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/27/slavery-loop...
Here's an article from a week ago:
https://www.thecut.com/2022/10/shein-is-treating-workers-eve...
The truth is though that if you aren't growing your own food and making your own household items, you are pretty much signed up to create large volumes of plastic waste in a way that is mostly out of your control.
We'd get guns come through a couple of times a month. Those were supposed to get called in to the police too, but since the job is only worked by felons that didn't happen (no snitching rule in effect).
This should really go in the compost bin.
I don't think so, I've seen reports that most plastic waste sent to China wound up in landfills or incinerators too. So it's actually probably a net improvement to not spend all that energy sending it 7000 miles to China to put it in a landfill.
It's been a fiction all along, we just paid China to make it easier for us to pull the wool over our own eyes. Or, even more cycnically, to get it into their landfills or incinerated air pollution instead of ours.
For glass, there are lots of different chemical compositions related to color, hardness and other physical and chemical properties, plus all the contamination with other materials like labels. You can't just throw it all into a big furnace and get anything except low quality glass with inclusions - and there's no market for that. Heck, ask glass blowers what COE they use and if you can bring your own colors in.
Paper has a lot of the same issue, cleaning it isn't worth what you can get from it. I would guess that we might see an increase in some sort of biological breakdown of it in the future, BUT that might end up releasing a lot more carbon than simply sequestering it in landfills.
I suspect that we'll see big improvement in plastics in the coming decades with better breakdown and separation options, but even there contamination will be a big problem.
Metals are about the only thing really practical to recycle, at least given current prices for them.
This upset me so much as it is very clear that there is no mature recycling industry and it's getting worse.
A mature recycling industry could just take "rubbish" as a single output, sort it efficiently and get on with things. Get money for taking your rubbish. Get money for selling recycled output.
Everyone has experienced the "outsource it to the masses so we don't have to cover the expense of doing it".
What happened to "efficiency of expertise" and "economies of scale" ?
The rest was burnt to produce heating and electricity - which releases an enormous amount of CO2 gases and other pollutants.
Not just a US problem.
[0] in Swedish: https://www.ivl.se/press/nyheter/2020-02-21-lattlast-rapport...
No it does not. This is simply untrue.
Burning plastic does not release pollutants, and the CO2 released just replaces CO2 released from burning other fuel (oil, natural gas, etc).
It's a 100% win, and every country should copy them.
That is simply not true. Polyethylene (the most common plastic) is C2H4, while natural gas is a mix ranging from CH4 to C3H8. i.e. almost identical in terms of CO2.
Plastic is actually better in some ways since you don't need to spend energy a second time to extract even more oil from the ground, you can just burn what you already have.
Plus the world does not burn exclusively natural gas, not even close.
> when it's possible not to.
As should be pretty obvious the idea is you don't burn some other oil, and instead burn plastic. When we are 100% off of oil/coal/etc we can stop burning plastic, but right now, today, burning plastic is the best option.
Burning plastic is not going to magically cause extra CO2 emissions, it would simply substitute one for another, with total amount unchanged.
It's not how many CO2 molecules per molecule of thing being burned. It's about how many CO2 molecules per joule of energy released.
You'd have to look at the enthalpy (delta H) of these combustion reactions to make a meaningful comparison, correct?
I used it because I didn't immediately find data on the enthalpy of burning plastic in combination with CO2 released.
Plastic is also a hydrocarbon, so the binding energy will be quite similar to natural gas, so my method is sufficiently accurate.
Very false
What exactly is a pollutant by your estimation?
> What exactly is a pollutant by your estimation?
Something that doesn't belong there in any amount. If there's simply too much of it, but some amount is ok, that might be a problem, but that's not a pollutant. Otherwise a flood from a hurricane would be called "Water pollution", which I hope you can see is a pretty silly definition.
I have never heard this definition before! How do you in particular decide which compounds shouldn’t be in the atmosphere in any amount?
It kind of seems like such a narrow definition of “pollutant” enables the justification of burning darn near anything short of man-made nuclear isotopes that don’t otherwise exist in nature. How does this definition serve a practical purpose?
edit: To address your hurricane analogy, I am not a fan of hurricanes or their damage. I have had friends die in hurricanes.
I agree that trying to argue an arbitrary definition of “pollution” to serve one’s pre-existing ideas or pedantic need to be Dictionary Emperor is silly and likely pointless at best, though.
Let's hear your definition then.
> How do you in particular decide which compounds shouldn’t be in the atmosphere in any amount?
Why is that hard? Nitrogen, Oxygen, CO2, Water, and some noble gasses.
Other stuff might be there naturally (for example salt by the sea), but are pollutants.
Can you link me to where you’ve found that “pollutant” is defined as a nearly infinite group of compounds but explicitly excludes CO2? This is the first time I’ve heard this.
And your dictionary definition is problematic because it doesn't define "unsuitable for a specific purpose". It's basically a circular definition. I will then ask you please define "unsuitable for a specific purpose" and we are back where we started.
How many compounds are there that are not nitrogen, oxygen, CO2 and “some noble gases”? In my estimation that is uncountable but maybe you have some hard numbers?
edit: “Suitable purpose“ for me would be creating or maintaining an environment that sustains human life.
Is your “checkmate” position something like “Hah! In my dictionary, ‘suitable purpose’ only relates to underwater welding, root beer production, and synthetic diamond formation!”
I personally find moving goalposts to avoid talking about concrete things in concrete terms to be problematic, but I understand that if a person is quite jaded about the future of life on earth that it might seem that the only thing worth debating is semantics. Maybe avoiding boredom matters more than attempting to avert catastrophe.
And? There are uncountable pollutants - why is that an issue? None of those other things belong in the air, in any amount.
> would be creating or maintaining an environment that sustains human life.
So my small campfire where I burn plastic is perfectly fine then? After all the toxins released are minor and rapidly dissipate, so the environment still sustains human life. Your definition doesn't even acknowledge that you can sustain life, but everyone has asthma because of all the particulate matter in the air.
By your definition there are no pollutants. Or at best you can only talk about them in bulk once they reach levels sufficient to kill, but never about individual releases.
By my definition each individual release of something that doesn't belong in the air is pollution. I find my definition much more usable and useful.
Does your classification of CO2 have a real upper limit of ppm wherein it becomes considered a pollutant? Or is it just “all plastic supply burned + 1”
A "novel entity" i.e. anything that doesn't belong in the air. Wikipedia adds that it must in some way harm things to be a pollutant, which is a reasonable addition.
I have a couple more questions!
If you hosted an indoor buffet and you needed to keep the chafing dishes warm, would you opt to burn ethanol or (if it were cheaper) the shredded remains of takeout containers?
and
Why does burning plastic have black smoke and ethanol not?
There are lots of sentences that you can start with “Every ounce of plastic.” Which one of those informs the definition of a pollutant?
All of them.
Looking at this in rough terms:
Burning emits gross CO2 but not net CO2. And burning doesn't take up all that landfill space. So burning is better than burial.
Making nothing at all (and washing nothing too, because washing has a cost!) is the best option, but is not always an option.
Making something else, or washing something, needs to be analyzed per situation.
Wait, are you saying that the optimal place to store carbon is in the atmosphere?
And 'acceptable' rather than 'optimal'.
How does burning plastic impact things for people that don’t own exhaust scrubbers?
We were never talking about just burning plastic. We were talking about burning plastic inside a heat/power plant.
And power plants, especially trash-fueled ones, have exhaust scrubbers. I only mentioned it now for emphasis, not because I was changing anything.
The first comment you replied to specified "industrial incinerator" for a reason.
> How does burning plastic impact things for people that don’t own exhaust scrubbers?
I don't care how it affects those people, because they're burning it outside a power plant, and they're not part of this conversation. If they burn it it's worse than if they bury it, but they shouldn't be doing either one. They should be handing the trash over to people that are equipped to handle it properly.
I actually suspect incineration is not a bad method at all, just wonder were everything else would go. I assume scrubbers or something.
These types of scrubbers are in use all over, it's not a new technology.
The main thing is to remove food and other organic waste, remove metals because they are useful. Glass is harmless, but also clutters up the ash, so best to remove it as well.
If it were up to me recycling would work like this:
Metal, plastic, and paper would be recycled, single stream. The metal is easily removed, the rest is burned.
Glass and organics (and everything else) would be thrown out, with some people opting to compost, I would encourage, but not require, composting. There is really no reason to recycle glass, and trying to do so causes more harm than good since it smashes and the shards get in everything and just makes it harder to make a pure product.
If you absolutely must recycle glass, it has to be in its own bin, do not single stream it.
Edit: source -> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187802961...
A 100% win would be not producing the plastics in the first place in order to not have this problem, and then producing heat via a renewable source.
Everything below that is less of a 100% win.
> Burning plastic does not release pollutants
That is strictly false. It depends on the plastic. "Dioxins are just one of the many harmful emissions from incinerators. They are highly toxic and can cause cancer and damage to the immune system"
https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/incineration-burning-plas....