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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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.

> 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

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.

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