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Comment by elevaet | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree that it's a sham, and the plastic is not even close to as recyclable as it is spun to be.

The part where I disagree is with throwing it in the landfill. At least if you "recycle" it, something like 30% actually does get fed back into the system (35% according to https://www.greenmatters.com/p/what-percent-recycling-actual...) vs. 0% in the landfill. It's terrible, but it's something.

In the landfill it will probably never be worth mining, it will be so mixed up with other crap.

I think the tinge of guilt you're talking about is really important and I wish more people feel that when they buy something in plastic. Plastic recycling really does make people feel off the hook, and they don't realize how poor plastic recycling actually is.

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A landfill is actually a great containment site. Its already fucked from an ecological standpoint so you might as well build the mound up higher and higher since the environmental damage has been paid already.

> The part where I disagree is with throwing it in the landfill.

Here in Germany most is burned - or exported (the number I found was 6% of the total; we also import some trash from European neighbors and it varies widely depending on type of trash and it's complicated the more I read). Even when I tried returning unused drugs to the drug store as recommended they looked at me funny and told me they'd just throw it into the regularly trash too anyway, since it's all burned. The burning facility uses extra high temperatures.

Map of the 66 German trash burning sites: https://static.dw.com/image/50749190_7.png

https://www.wsj.com/articles/germans-have-a-burning-need-for...

We do that so much now this causes concern about the CO2 balance sheet:

https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-europe-a-backlash-is-growi...

https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/pu... (2008 but it's a government agency paper)

So... before you are concerned about landfill impact I think you may want to check if this is where your trash actually ends up. Maybe it's burned.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/is-burning-trash-a-good...

https://www.clientearth.org/latest/latest-updates/stories/th...

The last two links also discuss environmental impact of trash burning. I did not find much about the technical side unfortunately, how good is current trash burning tech at filtering toxins? I understand 30 year old plants won't be good, but what about more modern ones?

This German article quotes a chemist specializing in "sustainability" saying that the air quality is not a problem these days (from trash burning). There are a lot of toxic waste products from the process, but apparently they are filtered out. They still need to be disposed of of course. --- https://www.dw.com/de/m%C3%BCllverbrennung-in-deutschland-en...

Reading further in that article, there still is some toxins left in the air, so over time there still is a problem of accumulation in the environment especially around the plant.

It also says there are 350,000 tons of filtered toxic waste after burning every year, and they are treated with a salt solution and stored-buried in an abandoned mine.

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At first I only wanted to point out that some countries use a lot of trash burning instead of landfills, but I googled and read a bit and it's very interesting and complex, and there is soooooooo much detail... overall though, no really good option exists, and all those methods are "leaking", meaning toxins end up in the environment one way or the other. Long-term we need something else, or we can hope for evolution to create more toxin-resistant lifeforms.

Burning at least emits CO2 instead of the methane emitted by a landfill, and can generate heat and electricity for residential use. In the end, recycling isn't feasible for most materials and the solution needs to come from the other pieces of the carbon puzzle.

Some landfills tap the methane and cycle it into the gas supply.

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