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Comment by cm2012 | Hacker News Reader

cm2012

So many people misunderstand landfills.

All the garbage produced in the U.S. for the next 1000 years could fit into a landfill 100 yards deep and 35 miles across on each side.

That is, landfills take a trivial amount of space.

Putting stuff in a landfill is way better for global warming since its not burned, the carbon is buried.

Almost all plastic waste in developed countries ends up in landfills, not the natural environment. The plastic pollution in the ocean is from developing countries and things unrelated to our soda bottles.

Modern landfills (as this article describes) are really efficient and have basically no leakage to the environment. As mentioned, you can make beautiful parks on a closed landfill with no smell. Technology is amazing.

View on HN

> Almost all plastic waste in developed countries ends up in landfills, not the natural environment.

Here in Sweden less than 0.5% of household waste goes to landfill. Almost everything is burned in co-generation plants for district heating, with pretty sophisticated exhaust gas treatment. Unfortunately most of the plastic waste that goes into the recycling bins also end up there in the end, with only about 10% currently being actually recycled (mostly it's PET that gets recycled, AFAIK).

edit: My 10% figure is some years old; plastic numbers are actually much better now! These days it's about 35%. For glass, paper and metal the same figures are all around 80% though so plastic still has a long way to go.

What’s completely crazy about that is that there’s people spending serious money trying to build carbon sequestration systems while other people are turning an inert and stable form of carbon back into carbon dioxide in the name of sustainability.

Would you rather we'd burn peat (which is also sequestered carbon) instead? Because that's what we used to do. We need to stay warm in winter one way or another.

In the 1950's we thought that in the future we'd have nuclear cogeneration plants. There was one such plant (Ågesta) in commercial operation, but it closed in the mid 1970's.

edit: also, to your point about sequestration: it's in actual and literal fact the same people. The Stockholm municipal energy company burns a lot of waste (and also woodchips and other renewables) for district heating. That same company also recently closed a big carbon sequestration deal with Microsoft: https://carboncredits.com/microsoft-and-stockholm-exergi-str....

Hopefully in the relatively near future, heat storage systems (like the sand batteries talked about in [0]) can do long term storage of heat energy from renewables and heating can provided relatively carbon free through the winter. For now though, I'd agree that the burning is not that big a deal.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6ZrM-IZlTE

We got that as well in Sweden - but we use water. Its part of the central-communal heating system that heats a large of the city.

I'd prefer you use wind to get the energy(or solar but there isn't much sun when you need heat) and burn nothing.

So would most of us, but somewhat impractically, Sweden tends to be at its coldest when it’s dark and windless.

Investments in long range, high wattage cabling to connect grids might be useful. There's plenty of sun light further south.

Of course, you need to run the numbers to make sure it actually makes sense. Both economically and from a resource point of view. Cables ain't free to build nor maintain.

But there's probably a trade to be made with the carbon capture people to sell them trash plastic to bury (or to have them pay you to bury your plastic. No need to actually ship the actual plastic around.)

> long-range, high-wattage cabling to connect grids

As the parent comment is on Sweden... That's a major discussion in our current politics and energy development landscape.

Not south, though... but north. 60% of Sweden's energy production is from hydroelectric dams far in the north, but most populations are down south. So, expanding this connection is the most imminently useful infrastructure investment that could be made. But that wouldn't be enough if we also use that power for heating.

The problem is that Sweden's largest energy demand is heating cold, windless winters, while the rest of Europe is also cold. Burning stuff to be warm can only really be replaced by nuclear power, which Sweden has been politically opposed to. Burning trash instead of coal is a pretty decent upgrade from that perspective.

> Investments in long range, high wattage cabling to connect grids might be useful. There's plenty of sun light further south.

With the energy loss over the distance needed (you basically need southern Italy/southern Spain for any reliable sun during the Swedish winter), that becomes too expensive to be practical.

Not to mention now you have a domino dependence, where a few bad days of weather in the Mediterranean can take out multiple countries at once, instead of Spain/Italy being able to rely on their northern neighbours in such a scenario.

> With the energy loss over the distance needed (you basically need southern Italy/southern Spain for any reliable sun during the Swedish winter), that becomes too expensive to be practical.

Can't be worse than that cable from Australia to Singapore?

> Not to mention now you have a domino dependence, where a few bad days of weather in the Mediterranean can take out multiple countries at once, instead of Spain/Italy being able to rely on their northern neighbours in such a scenario.

That's what peaker plants are for. There's no reason to go for 100% purity. Getting to 99% renewables gets you 99% of the way.

Some numbers: Swedish electricity production in 2023 was 163 TWh. It's for all practical purposes 100% renewable or nuclear, with a mix of approximately 40/30/20/10 hydro/nuclear/wind/other, where "other" contains 2% solar and the rest is pretty much just electricity byproducts from district heating.

Also in 2023, district heating delivered a total of 53 TWh to customers. About two thirds of this came from waste and biofuels, specifically 47% renewable biofuels (mostly woodchips, bark and other forestry industry byproducts) and 20% waste. The remaining third came from an eclectic mix of inputs such as industrial waste heat (7,5%), heat pumps (5% net, that is after the electricity consumption has been subtracted), exhaust gas condensation (11%), biogas from landfills and compost (2%), fossil fuels (2,5%) and various other stuff. Turns out my info about peat was kinda out of date; it's been almost entirely phased out now.

Average CO2 emissions for the electricity generation was 41g CO2 equivalents per kWh, and for district heating about 55 g/kWh. Countries with less emissions than this do exist, for example Norway and Iceland are down around 30 g/kWh, but this is already better than almost every other country on the planet. US electricity generation for comparison averaged 369 g/kWh in 2023.

So: replacing all of the district heating with heat pumps would be an insanely huge project requiring a massive expansion of electricity generation, and it would have very low return on investment when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions. There is also the problem that heating energy demands are extremely uneven and unpredictable, both over the year and between years. You need a significant amount of extra capacity for very cold days, and even averaged over the year the difference between an average winter and a cold one can on the order of 20%. Just burning stuff works great as a solution for this, it's easy to have capacity on demand. Air-source heat pumps also become much less efficient on very cold days when you need them the most, which is why they're not that popular for heating here (people prefer ground source heat pumps, but those have limitations in densely populated areas because the ground doesn't contain infinite energy).

Also, a side note: the heat generation in district heating plants is extremely efficient compared to electricity generation using combustible fuels. The average efficiency of the heat generation in these plants in 2023 was 96%, and that's before exhaust gas condensation is taken into account.

In other words: there's a reason we are doing things this way.

Thanks!

> That's what peaker plants are for.

Unless you can wish natural gas into existence, that means keeping a lot of infrastructure and storage just in case.

Which is one part of this story: landfills create a lot of natural gas which we can store and use on demand. Large farms also create natural gas as part of manure disposal process. (cities also create some as part of sewage treatment, but I'm not aware of any that harness it - human waste if not handled carefully is deadly)

Yes, but a lot less than using natural gas for your base load.

False choice. Don’t burn anything.

How is peat a false alternative? It is literally what Swedes would burn if they didn't burn their waste. There exists no practical alternative atm. Sure it's worth working towards another alternative, but we also need to not freeze right now.

It’s a false alternative because you don’t need to burn anything for heat.

I mean if "heat" is the primary product burning this is kind of nifty. And producing electricity at the same time is a bonus. Letting wood etc. rot releases CO2 as well.

So it goes into the sky instead? That seems more sightly, but the CO2 emissions must be astronomical.

If we didn't burn waste we'd need to burn something else to stay warm in winter. Currently we supplement the waste with _mostly_ renewables, like byproducts from the forestry industry (e.g. treetops, wood chips, sawdust) and the olive oil industry (olive pits; we import this stuff from the Mediterranean region), but we burn a bit of peat too because there aren't enough reasonably priced renewables. Burning waste really isn't meaningfully worse than burning anything else.

After the combustion we're left with 15-20% by weight in slag; some of this is metal that is recovered and sent to recycling, but the rest is effectively gravel that is used in e.g. road construction and the like. There's also 3-5% by weight of toxic gases captured by the exhaust gas treatment. This is sent to a special facility in Norway that more or less puts it in landfill, although a very carefully managed one.

> If we didn't burn waste we'd need to burn something else to stay warm in winter.

Why not nuclear/renewables?

Nuclear was a thing in the 50's/60's but district heating isn't practical over long distances and nobody wanted nuclear plants in their suburbs.

Renewables we already do burn quite a bit of. But really, quite a lot of household waste is actually renewable too - cardboard packaging, food scraps that didn't end up in the compost, such things. So it's really not that bad.

Waste accounts for about 20% of the total energy required for heating in Sweden.

I meant what's impossible about making electricity from nuclear/renewable sources and then powering electric heaters with that electricity?

You'd want to power heat pumps.

Electric heaters get you 100% efficiency. Heat pumps get you 400%+ efficiency.

That is already a thing, and it's being expanded. The Stockholm municipal energy company is already operating what they claim to be the world's largest heat pump facility with a capacity to extract 225 MW of heat from treated wastewater. It first opened in 1986 and has been incrementally expanded over the years. Both the hot and the cold sides of the heat pumps are used; the cold side goes into the district cooling system and is used in e.g. datacenters. Still, this facility has both heat pumps, biofuel furnaces, and as a backup for the rare extremely cold days, resistive water heaters.

It should also be mentioned that Swedish electricity generation is effectively 100% renewable already; it's mainly wind, hydro and nuclear. The co-generation plants mainly produce heating and only a small amount of electricity, more or less as a byproduct.

Waste incineration has a more or less negligible carbon footprint if you look at the big picture.

> Nuclear was a thing in the 50's/60's but district heating isn't practical over long distances and nobody wanted nuclear plants in their suburbs.

Modern heat pumps are really good (like 400%+ efficient), and run on electricity.

People don't like it when you burn nuclear waste, burning windmills isn't very effective --- at least not the modern metal ones, and solar panels are going to be toxic if you burn them. :P

Neat, thanks!

When it comes to plastics I like to think that it’s basically a product of oil and other oil related products are burnt all the time for energy.

The end goal should include a carbon capture step. They’ve looked into that here in Oslo, Norway, but it ended up much costlier than anticipated and at the moment it looks like it’s going to be very very drawn out.

Carbon capture at the source is usually not that terrible of an idea. Trying to capture carbon from the air around us is very challenging, but if the air is 80% CO2 to begin with it’s going to be much cheaper to capture half of it then trying to capture the same amount from regular air.

I heard that a good way to capture carbon on a bigger scale would be through burning trees and capturing the carbon. Store the carbon in a concentrated form, use the heat to produce electricity and when you chop down trees to burn you also make space for growing new trees. Sounds kinda slow though, and not exactly cheap either.

You could just not burn the stuff, and capture the carbon directly in unoxidised form.

Or we could just stop pumping up oil and gas from the ocean floor and then not make any plastics in the first place.

Plastics are useful (to many people).

If all the externalities get priced in, you can let people decide for themselves what they want and need.

Big if there tho.

If you want power, it is better to make renewables. The problem with carbon capture is that more energy and more fuel to run the capture. It costs too much.

If you want to sequester the carbon, just cut down the trees and bury them. The problem is that there isn't enough trees on Earth to power civilization or sequester enough carbon.

It’s much better with renewables yes! In the freeze of the Oslo winter it’s a bit hard to capture enough sunlight to heat all the housing we have here. There’s not much wind either.

We have a lot of hydroelectric power, but that’s very dependent on how much it rained in the autumn. We are also starting to build out wind power, but it’s slow going.

We do import a lot of electricity from further south in Europe where there is more wind and solar.

I would love to have solar on my roof. The legislation is super complicated though since I live in an apartment and we would basically have to create our own communal energy company. We would also have to pay taxes on the electricity we produce and use ourselves. It’s somewhat simpler for people that own a house, but I’m not quite rich enough to own a house in Oslo.

There is also an increasing demand for our renewable electricity in the industry and especially with the data centres that are being built because of our cheap electricity.

What is "carbon capture" exactly? How does the mechanism work? Does it take an energy input?

I don’t know. You’ll probably have to do your own research.

I thought you guys sold it to Denmark. We love burning that stuff. Even put a recreational ski slope on top of one of our incineration plants!

Landfills are the third largest source of atmospheric methane (https://www.epa.gov/land-research/quantifying-methane-emissi...) from human activities, a greenhouse gas worse than CO2.

Methane has a GWP of 27-30 over 100 years (https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...), meaning it is 27-30 times more effective at trapping heat than CO2.

Landfill leachate is quite terrifying. You end up with a bunch of reactions between whatever random assortment of garbage found itself on the same truck, and the resulting liquid is acidic enough to dissolve pipes as well as heavily contaminated with heavy metals.

I am fine with landfills, but they're one of those engineering marvels -- like bridges, microwave ovens, sky scrapers, aircraft, high voltage transformers, cranes, or motor vehicles -- that are about taking something inherently dangerous and letting us interact with it safely.

> All the garbage produced in the U.S. for the next 1000 years could fit into a landfill 100 yards deep and 35 miles across on each side.

> That is, landfills take a trivial amount of space.

Damn, I had to think about this for a second, but you are right.

How the hell did I not realize this before?

Can you please popularize this more? Maybe compress into a pithy phrase.

The supposed triviality of this size is not sitting well with me.

What’s described is a 100 yard deep hole. So about 27 stories. It’s 35 miles per side, so 35 x 35 = 1225 square miles in area. That’s bigger than any city in the mainland US[1].

It’s a 27 story deep hole that’s twice as big as Houston. Three times as big as the city of LA, and over half the size of the urban metropolitan LA area[2]. Four times the size of New York (or three times, if you include the water as well as the land).

This is not a trivial amount of land - and it gets worse if you were not to have it be (ridiculously!) one hundred yards deep.

I’m not arguing we’re about to run out of landfill space imminently, but calling this ‘trivial’ is not what I’d call it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles

That's also just the volume of trash. It doesn't include all the support infrastructure present at each landfill or the buffer real estate so that it is not adjacent to any desirable real estate. It's not practical to have a single huge landfill serving the country, so these other factors get multiplied by every actual landfill site we build. Still there are scant few, if any, counties in the U.S. that are so strained on real estate they can't bury their garbage.

It's trivial compared to the amount of space in the US and the timelines we're talking about.

Realistically no one is going to build this super hole, it will be 1,000 smaller landfills built over 1,000 years.

Why would you compare it to the size of a single city? Everyone doesn’t live in a single city and we’re talking about a landfill to take trash for 1000 years.

Fair enough. Here it is visualized using Google Earth:

https://x.com/breckyunits/status/1831080588406849585

The largest open cut mine in the world, Bingham Canyon, is more than ten times as deep.

While it's not a good idea to just chuck stuff into an abandoned mine, the effort to excavate a hole that size is doable for a single site operated by a single company employing 2000 workers over a century. It's pretty trivial in comparison to any other environmental problem.

> hole that size

Bingham Canyon is roughly cone shaped, not comparable to the rectangular prism described above.

To achieve comparable volume of the rectangular prism, you will need to dig a much deeper cone.

https://www.mining-technology.com/features/feature-top-ten-d...

Quick calc: An 1000 yard deep cone with 35 mile diameter has 3x as much volume as a rectangle shaped hole 100 yards deep with 35 miles on each side.

> To achieve comparable volume of the rectangular prism, you will need to dig a much deeper cone.

Yeah, holes with sloped sides are easier to dig than vertical-walled ones. But you don't need to have them sloping all the way down to a deep point in the middle; for a shallow (comparatively, like this) hole you can just slope the walls down to the same flat bottom.

At a 45-degree angle, you could have the bottom of your 100-yard-deep pit be 35 miles - 100 yards across, and the opening 35 miles + 100 yards. Which would be a pretty negligible difference on the surface -- and, I think, make the volume a tiny bit bigger.

There's a quarry in the Chicago area, quite close to the city and visible from the interstate, that's over 100 yards deep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornton_Quarry#/media/File:Th.... Digging such a deep hole isn't ridiculous at all. Also, as the video shows, landfills usually rise a significant height above the surrounding land (and are converted into a hilly park when finished).

"How the hell did I not realize this before?"

There was a concentrated effort to blow the problem of landfills massively, massively out of proportion in the 1980s and 1990s. I have not seen in active in a couple of decades, but the cultural detritus of the effort still floats around, and few people are terribly motivated to go correcting it since it's a dead issue.

There have been some legitimate improvements in the space since then. A disturbing amount of Grady is talking about is relatively new, not something we've been doing for a century now.

But the propaganda in the 1980s and 1990s was definitely around running out of space on Earth itself to store garbage itself because we're just generating so much. There's a picture I doubt I could dig up that has been injected into my brain of a field of garbage as seagulls fly over it and a lone backhoe in the distance tries to contend with the field of garbage. And, sure, the actual garbage dump isn't a pleasant place, though to be honest I was always sort of impressed with how little smell they tended to generate even in the 1980s. But there's a lot of unrepresentative places on Planet Earth to plop a camera. Give me a million dollars and I'll make a documentary proving Earth is uninhabited and uninhabitable. Chromecast's default photo screen saver is full of pictures of dozens of square miles of uninhabited wasteland that are very pretty colors due to the local chemical composition. But that's not a great way to understand the world in a proportional manner.

Speaking for the US at the time, in a semi-rural area, the plausibility of this was enhanced by what you would find walking through a forest. People threw a lot more stuff just straight out of their cars on the roadway, dumped cars and mattresses in state forests, all kinds of things like that. Times have changed on that front. But even then, it was really only where the people were. Most land was not full of garbage. But, pretty much by definition, the people are where the people are, so it stood out, made it a lot easier to feel like we were drowning in garbage, when all we really needed to do was take a bit better care of where we actually lived.

(This comment is about land garbage. Oceans are a completely different beast for many reasons and I'm not speaking to the issues of plastic in the ocean.)

Tires are a source of microplastics, as well.

https://assessments.epa.gov/risk/document/&deid=361070

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972...

I'd guess that it's cheaper to ship a lot of garbage to developing countries.

Is it? Land is dirt cheap in the US. Surely it's cheaper to bury it locally than ship it half way across the world? Even for the plastic that's being shipped half way across the world, they're ostensibly done for recycling purposes (ie. they're buying the plastic waste), and the unrecycleable plastics end up being mismanaged.

I’ve heard, shipping a lot of garbage to China was quite common until the Chinese banned it. That was economically viable because China exports so much and many container ships would otherwise return empty to China.

It was viable only because we were shipping "recyclables" that had to be "recycled" by contract, not pure garbage that could have just been buried. Sorting through that whole mess of "recyclables" was more expensive than shipping it to China and letting them just burn or bury it.

>Sorting through that whole mess of "recyclables" was more expensive than shipping it to China and letting them just burn or bury it.

I thought they didn't bother and just buried it if it wasn't profitable.

>GONZALEZ: Whoa. Oh, I've been doing that one wrong. So the city of Nogales went around to everyone's house this morning and picked up their recyclables. [...] And they brought them here. And where is all this going to go?

>GALLEGO: Trash.

>GONZALEZ: The recycling is going into the trash. I am watching pristine beer bottles and juice cartons and cardboard boxes get smushed into a pile of wet, gooey, dripping food waste and soggy diapers.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/741283641

> I thought they didn't bother and just buried it if it wasn't profitable.

In my county, they are obliged by the contract to NOT bury the mixed recyclables. So they used to offload it to some companies that would then also promise not to bury them (pinky promise), and ship them to China. Contracts in China are then not so easy to follow and enforce and voila, problem is now somewhere else.

> I thought they didn't bother and just buried it if it wasn't profitable.

The point is to cheat. Say you recycle and ensure that there are enough links in the chain nobody can follow it to the end and prove the stuff you ship to China wasn't recycled. China did recycle some stuff, but most of it wasn't. China decided to stop participating in that scam though.

Right. you're not paying to ship it to China, you're subsidizing a boat and containers that are going back empty (or not going back) otherwise.

We still ship scrap metal and other recyclables over.

China, and other countries, put limits on such imports, as their recycling industries were not exactly environmentally friendly. Technically you can still import plastic waste into China, but with a very low contamination percentage that's hard to achieve.

You are correct. In the US at least, land is dirt cheap. Transporting stuff is not cheap. For this reason, it’s common for some US states to ship garbage to other US states for disposal, simply because geographically it makes economic sense.

Land close enough to cities to be reasonable to truck garbage to is less plentiful though and you have to factor in the costs of properly containing and processing that garbage.

That's true, but NYC still ships trash all over the place: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/8714ca7999a64704b59721c...

At the end of the day it has to go somewhere, and there's no room for it in the five boroughs, so they pay what they need to pay. And it's still cheaper than sending it overseas (otherwise they would).

NYC is a bit of a special case for a lot of things due to it's size/density and location. Most places don't ship their waste that far from it's origin because it's expensive.

In Oslo we import trash from the other European countries and then transport a bunch of our own trash to Sweden. Seemingly all because of some carbon emissions taxes in Norway.

https://www.nrk.no/norge/fyller-ovnene-med-importsoppel-samt...

Oregon is a lot closer, and they accept a lot of trash from my state by rail. No need to put it on a boat.

Note that western countries export waste to developing countries.

We (Toronto) used to export our trash to Michigan when the incinerator was de-commissioned and the landfill was full.

The plastic pollution in the ocean is from our soda bottles we shipped to developing countries.

IIRC, ~30%[0] of ocean plastic came from fishing nests. They are huge, break often and it’s easier and cheaper to throw aboard an old one than bring it onshore for recycling. (edit) 0: 46% https://www.seashepherdglobal.org/latest-news/marine-debris-...

Totally unrelated but since it’s from seashepherd I can’t help adding Paul Watson trial from extradition in Japan is tomorrow.

Additionally, the top 10 rivers, 9 of which in Asia, produce an extremely high precent of land based ocean pollution

E.g. the bottles we sent them for "recycling"

That makes up a tiny amount of overall plastic waste.

>I estimate that a few percent of ocean plastics could result from trade from rich countries. A figure as high as 5% would not be unreasonable.

https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade

Not only. If you go to a developing country in Asia, more likely than not you'll see that locals have no issues throwing thrash everywhere in nature because they're not conscient of the problems it causes.

True, but for now Asia is far from the biggest consumer.

https://tappwater.co/blogs/blog/how-many-people-consume-bott....

https://www.statista.com/statistics/505794/cds-per-capita-co...

Considering that in some Asian countries the only way to acquire drinkable water is to buy it bottled, I'm somewhat doubtful of those "estimates".

For the sake of analogy: or the sea food we buy from them

I think the number comes from one study about the great pacific garbage patch and cannot be generalised to all ocean trash.

You are very right:

> Approximately 46% of the 79 thousand tons of ocean plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of fishing nets, some as large as football fields, according to the study published in March 2018 in Scientific Reports

While generalisations may be misleading, when people talk about ocean pollutions they often think about the patches.

> Putting stuff in a landfill is way better for global warming since its not burned, the carbon is buried.

Landfills release gas. Of course it is better than burning plastic but there is no environmentalist on earth demanding for plastic to be burned.

> Almost all plastic waste in developed countries ends up in landfills, not the natural environment.

This is horrifyingly incorrect! Developed countries process only some of their trash themselves. The rest is shipped into poorer countries. It will end up in the natural environment.

The UK ships off two thirds to other countries.

>This is horrifyingly incorrect! Developed countries process only some of their trash themselves. The rest is shipped into poorer countries. It will end up in the natural environment.

No, you're incorrect.

https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade

>Many people think that rich countries ship most of their plastic waste overseas. But is this really true?

>The short answer is no: many countries export some of their waste, but they still handle most of it domestically.

>[...] When it comes to the fraction of plastic waste that is exported, the UK is one of the largest exporters. For context, the US exported about 5% of its plastic waste in 2010. France exported 11%, and the Netherlands exported 14%.[...]

>[...] I estimate that a few percent of ocean plastics could result from trade from rich countries. A figure as high as 5% would not be unreasonable.

> No, you're incorrect.

Exactly what statement is incorrect?

Adding to that:

Statistics show that developed countries are shipping significant amounts of trash into poorer countries. But there is most likely an even higher number of unrecorded cases. Supply chains can be difficult to monitor even within the OECD, and an estimated third of shipments is illegal.[0]

[0]: https://environment.ec.europa.eu/news/video-how-eu-tackling-...

>Exactly what statement is incorrect?

Your original comment:

>> Almost all plastic waste in developed countries ends up in landfills, not the natural environment.

>This is horrifyingly incorrect! Developed countries process only some of their trash themselves.

I guess you can weasel out of this by claiming that >85% counts as "some", but it's misleading at the very least. Moreover, your statement was trying to refute "Almost all plastic waste in developed countries ends up in landfills, not the natural environment", which so far as I can tell is true, even if some small fraction gets exported to developing countries and end up mismanaged.

I saw this article in another comment somewhere above. It makes an interesting point that recycled PET demand now outstrips supply and that is partly because curbside recycling is usually too contaminated to be useful. Instead, DRS systems which refund you like nickel per bottle generate much better streams, but they aren't widely implemented.

All that said. I'm not sure which if you is correct.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.13496

In reality, a significant portion is exported to developing countries, where it often ends up mismanaged. Claiming developed countries handle "almost all" of their plastic waste without acknowledging this export is detracting from wrongdoings me and you bear responsibility for as citizens of relatively free and open democratic societies. It is not somehow misleading. It is morally reprehensible.

>In reality, a significant portion is exported to developing countries, where it often ends up mismanaged.

Source? This directly contradicts what the data in the above article, and that actually has sources backing it up.

> It is not somehow misleading.

True. The simpler and more exact statement is just: It is misleading. No need for a weaselly "somehow". Here's guessing that's not what you meant, but... Too bad for you, then.

Best way not to come off as a hot-headed zealot who's either ignorant of or intentionally twisting the truth is not to behave like a hot-headed zealot who's either ignorant of or intentionally twisting the truth.

> Landfills release gas. Of course it is better than burning plastic but there is no environmentalist on earth demanding for plastic to be burned.

Methane comes from organic waste mostly, most plastics do not degrade in a landfill environment.

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