Landfills Leak More Planet-Baking Methane Than We Thought

You are double counting in multiple different ways.

Over 100 years it’s 80x for years 0-19 years and 15x for years 20-99 which averages to 28x by weight. Largely because 1 ton of methane turns into almost 3 tons of CO2.

Except when you start with CO2 at 44.01 g/mol it turns into CH4 at 16.04 g/mol you only get 16.04/44.01 ~= 36.4% as much methane and thus 36.4% of that global warming.

Net result for years 0-19 it’s 29x as bad and years 20-99 it’s 5.5x as bad. And considering the relatively trivial amount of CO2 released as methane vs sequestered in landfills they are a massive reduction in climate change.

Sometimes I don't know if people are kidding or something.

Obviously things ending up in landfills is not sustainable.

It's rather wiser to use the remains of the tomato to directly or indirectly make fertilizer to fertilize new tomato plants, eg by composting them [1]. Now you've sort of got a cycle going on there, which you could in theory sustain indefinitely. (Hence the word.) Composting has been done since at least roman times.

Properly done, you can reduce methane emissions from composting considerably. (Releasing mostly CO2 back into the air, and the remainder is sufficiently low for 'the environment' to be able to deal with [2])

If you at least believe in the conservation of mass [3], you'll realize that [C released from composting] = [C the Tomato originally captured from the air in photosynthesis].

I'm summarizing entire fields of science, so there's devils in the details here. But closed cycles of chemical reactions where matter cycles endlessly (driven by incoming energy from sunlight, and ultimately emitting waste heat back to space), is a real thing in Biological systems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compost

[2] assuming composting were the only methane source, there'd be more than sufficient methane sinks to handle the flow. Unfortunately, it's not the only methane source. But we still need to deal with the organic waste.

[3] I mean, for one: the total mass of our planet isn't noticeably changing much, that I'm aware of.

(edits for clarity and readability)

A century ago, most food waste was fed to pigs and chickens. Now it rots in landfills.

Plants get most of their structure by pulling in carbon from the atmosphere and using it to make more plant. Regenerative organic farming generally works to keep that captured carbon in the soil, by using excess plant matter as soil amendment, to put it simply. From what I have seen this has the potential for massive carbon retention over chemical intensive industrial farming which generally does not focus on the use of organic matter as soil amendment.

Lol the "nitrogen cycle" is dead at most "modern" farms. They kill all the microbes that perform the nitrogen fixing and then add it back in manually.

And you'll permanently lose whatever compounds are in that garbage by burning it - everything disintegrates into co2, water, nitrous oxide and a few other basic elements. On top of that, burning anything will always result in particulate matter emissions and solid residue, which is highly toxic as it concentrates everything that doesn't burn.

Now imagine in 20 years we find some way of cheaply separating plastic polymers into raw precursors, say by designing some bacteria or fungus that selectively targets a specific polymer. Had we just burned all of the old trash, we'd be out of luck - but assuming we find such a process, old landfills just became gold mines.

When I started woodworking I was surprised to learn that burning wood releases far less carbon than putting it in a landfill.

The problem is that carbon focus is one dimensional. There are lots of emissions harmful to the environment and human life.

My small local landfill harvests methane, and this is in a state where regulations very minimal. I'm not sure what you consider obscenely large.

As an Australian, and as someone who is relatively switched on and pays attention to things in general, I do not know what I can and cannot recycle -- it has changed a few times in the past few years, and of course whenever I move to a new council area I have to contend with new rules.

What can you recycle? Who knows. Bottles, usually, but only if they're clear, green, or brown glass. And not if they're broken. Definitely no glass from mirrors. Also, probably not the bottle lids, or the the triggers from spray bottles. Aerosol cans? Sure. But not their caps. Aluminium foil, yes, but only if it's not got food contamination on it, so no. Same with aluminium baking tins and tin cans (actually steel!) from canned food. Can I recycle my pizza boxes in this council? Currently, yes, but only if they're not too greasy. What's too greasy? Still who knows. Coffee cups are recyclable in some councils, but not all, by the way. The lids are recyclable in basically all of them. As an aside, there are issues with recycling soft plastics, even if the plastic is actually recyclable, so be careful to make sure that even if it has the right symbol on it, it's not too bendy.

All of that, and ... well, it doesn't matter what I do, because my neighbour just yeets literally everything that smells like plastic or paper into their recycling bin, so my careful work is just commingled with garbage anyway.

This feels like an over-wrought analogy for a lot of things in my life, really.

In my city, it’s brown, blue, and green bins, respectively. They are slowly changing the green bins to black ones, presumably for consistent messaging with the rest of the state, but it will take years.

Usually not - modern landfills are completely enclosed (sealed in plastic) and primarily composed of things that don't compost at all, like metals and plastics. The materials in a landfill aren't recovered.

By comparison, the point of composting is to break down the organic waste where it can be reused as soil and fertilizer.