Hacker News Reader

Comment by vore | Hacker News Reader

Is incineration really that much better? You’re trading off one kind of pollution for another: toxic emissions and toxic byproducts that still have to be disposed of in some way…

One way or another, countries have to deal with non-recyclable, non-compostable waste, and all solutions to it are pretty nasty.

View on HN

A boatload of waste containing an amount of toxins come in. At the price of using up filters, a truckload of ash containing a smaller amount of toxins comes out. And you get quite a bit of energy out of the process too.

Sure, the energy you get out isn't worth as much as the materials and labour you put in. If that's a modern plant, you also recover metals from the waste - a roughly break-even process that allows you to recover material that was previously unrecyclable. The ash coming out at the end is orders of magnitude less voluminous than the input, uniform, powder and dry. The Internet claims this gets used in construction as bulk fill and road underlays, but I haven't seen any official materials about that.

All in all the process is economically viable (especially when you have no cheap land to waste, but probably otherwise too, see the case of Sweden importing Italian trash) and seems strongly preferable ecologically.

It is used in Japan but very few info in English https://www.tokyokankyo.jp/tokyoprogram/en/recycling-technol... https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%BA%B6%E8%9E%8D%E3%82%B9%E3...

A million times yes.

If you gather all your garbage, especially plastic garbage, and burn it, recovering heat and energy, you can offset a lot of oil- and gas-powered electricity generation. As an aside, it doesn't matter how many plastic straws and plastic bags you make, as long as you burn them after use.

Landfills also emit greenhouse gases, uncontrolled, over a long period of time, so it's not so much of a trade-off as you think it is.

Since 1990, Sweden has cut greenhouse gas emissions from trash to one fourth of what it was, and that's by moving from landfills to trash incineration: https://www.naturvardsverket.se/data-och-statistik/klimat/va... (Blue is greenhouse gases from landfills, dark blue is emissions from trash incinerators.)

You get toxic ash for a landfill, if you have a proper smoke treatment, but you could argue that the waste was already toxic before the burning and far less so now since many toxins are destroyed in fire.

Also the volume is smaller for the ash.

The thing is, with incineration you also lose all the raw materials and the energy contained within them, as well as release all the CO2 and other greenhouse gases - not a good thing given that most of the stuff ending up in incinerators is fossil in origin.

Landfills at least can be mined in the future when we develop at-scale actual recycling capabilities for plastics (e.g. GMO bacteria/fungi that break down the polymers in the waste into precursors that can be used to create new plastics).

The thing is, virtually every single incineration plant also generates electricity, typically at smaller scales than dedicated plants to serve smaller regions, but distributed/decentralized generation is a big win for resilience of the grid overall.

Also please provide at least one citation where "maybe we'll totally reverse the negative effects of this thing we put into our environment" has been fulfilled. I can only think of failures to live up to that expectation: PFAS, microplastics, oil spills, etc.

You want to separate e.g. iron from the trash before burning. I even think you can separate aluminum.

Plastic is not a raw material really. It is probably better to burn it instead of doing landfills with it waiting for some miracle bacteria.

We could use paper and cardboard for most plastic packaging and many uses of plastic packaging is useless, like those hard plastics around scissors or whatever in the store.

> It is probably better to burn it instead of doing landfills with it waiting for some miracle bacteria.

Still releases fossil-origin CO2, we can't afford that for global warming reasons. In a landfill the CO2 remains trapped.

Agree on your reduction point, that is long overdue but will only happen with significant governmental regulations.

> In a landfill the CO2 remains trapped.

Some, yes, but not all.

Plastics take decades centuries to degrade, and most of that degradation is physical - it gets degraded to microplastics. As soon as it's in a landfill where it's not in motion or exposed to sunlight, it's essentially conserved for human lifetime cycles.

Until too much water makes it into the landfill, creates an acid with other mixed materials (like cardboard glues, household cleaners) and then leaches the acids and plastic and heavy metal into the aquifer.

Most landfills near me with liners made in the last 30 years have acid problems and liner breaches

I was going to write that plastics has to be bogger all in weight, but it is 100 kg per person and year in Europe and 200 kg in the US, which is kinda surprising.

There has to be due to industrial or commercial usage right? I mean, I would be surprised if I used more than even 10 kg of plastics per year. That is like 1000s of plastic bags, and I and most people use paper bags anyways.

That figure may include clothing, of which an utter utter majority is plastics-based nowadays.

The primary researchers had a note on this:

    we found that people overlook waste reduction and reuse

Consuming less and eschewing excessive over production is just crazy though, right?

I’m rebutting the parent post that claims countries other than the US somehow have a better solution to landfilling for non-recyclable waste.

Of course solving the root cause is the right thing to do, no argument from me!

I got that, all the same it seemed like as good a thread branch as any to emphasis that the OP research article really stresses an excess of waste as the primary issue before hitting the break down of how to deal with that.

I might suggest that very likely the USofA has a mush higher "waste generated per capita" than many other counries .. and that a number of countries are having to deal with mountains of waste shipped onto their shores by the USofA (and a few other first world offenders).

I have no argument with you, we seem to be on a similar page here :)

> somehow

The US has an absolutely enormous Not-Invented-Here field around pretty much any policy discussion. It is simply inconceivable for most Americans to look for solutions outside their own borders.

The solution is called modern trash incineration plants.

Of course incineration is better. Modern incineration plants are very effective at filtering out the nasty stuff. And it’s way easier to make sure a small quantity of very concentrated nasty stuff is never released into nature, than dispersed chemicals and heavy metals in a huge quantity of trash in a landfill.

What’s more, we can use the energy for electricity and district heating. It’s very common in Northern Europe now. Copenhagen has one right in their city (with a ski slope on it)

CO2 emissions should tend towards net zero as we move towards a future where we don’t dig up fossil hydrocarbons anymore. In the meantime, the trash power plants is mostly offsetting fossil fuel power plants anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com