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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, in every city everywhere, we bury mountains and mountains full of arbitrary garbage. This stuff is not buried and a lot ended up burning. At least it's sorted! And arguably burning it could be better than burying it.

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I'm confused by this stance. How could burning it be better than burying it?

If you bury it it's (relatively) inert and all stored neatly in one place. Whereas if you burn it you release it in the atmosphere, release carbon and probably not-so-great residues everywhere.

You have to dig a hole to bury and it’s expensive to do that, for large enough holes.

Not really, most landfills use natural depressions or are hills instead of holes.

And in some very flat countries, those landfillhils become nice recreational landscape features, for example, the "Col du VAM"¹ in Drenthe, the Netherlands.

¹ https://www.drenthe.nl/locaties/61224200/vam-berg

If you bury it, you slowly leak all kinds of toxic stuff into groundwater and soil around. If you incinerate it, you recover some heat used for district heating and you have controlled circumstances - filter and monitor emissions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/climate/sweden-garbage-us...

I recommend reading the article to see what the constant burning of clothes is doing to their air.

This is where waste to energy plants should be used. It is a shame the unusable clothes are not burnt directly at the source to create electricity and remote heating. Instead it is shipped to the other end of the world by boat and truck and then burnt in open nature for no good.

burning can be better, if done properly, e.g. full combustion + capture of anything else that survived the combustion.

A clothes wildfire is very much absolutely not that.

In every US city maybe. Europe mostly burns the waste for energy.

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