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Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely use landfills, especially with plastic waste, as shibboleth to know whether I'm talking to somebody who is an environmentalist or somebody who is an "environmentalist."

Anyone who thinks recycling plastic is some sort of normative good because "waste is bad" clearly hasn't put any thought into what environmental issues need to be focused on right now.

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Waste is inherently problematic, regardless of how we manage it. While burning plastic for energy might seem like a solution, it's not ideal. We can generate clean electricity through other means that are cheaper and less polluting. Burning waste still releases harmful toxins into the environment and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions – even if it reduces landfill methane, which is a potent contributor to climate change. Ultimately, the best approach is to minimize waste generation in the first place, as this prevents both environmental harm and the need for costly and imperfect solutions.

It does seem like we are producing an unnecessarily large amount of waste, but the last sentence does not come of as constructive to me, because it doesn't offer any concrete action we can take towards a goal of reducing waste. Instead if comes of as sidestepping the issue of dealing with the waste we have.

That's one way of looking at it.

Another way of looking at it, is that your vision is not constructive, because you wave away the real solution as "not actionable". Parent does not propose concrete action, but neither do you. We can have meaningful discussion without everything having to be accompanied by a five-step plan.

For actionable reduction of waste, just look at how Europe has a comparable life style as the US, whilst using less resources and emitting less GHG equivalent. Not placing the EU on a pedestal. Just saying that reduction is not just possible, it's being done, as we speak. But it requires changes and is for sure a harder sell than "no need to change any habits, technology will save us".

Many if not all "large" (50k) cities in Sweden burn their trash for district heating, we filter most bad stuff out with filters, it still releases CO2, but burning it means it won't start producing methane, which is a worse greenhouse gas.

Europe also doesn't tax "light trucks" as if they were bicycles nor force people into cars to survive.

The American mindset "I do what I do and you do what you do" worked in the 60s and 70s when people were unaware they're fucking the planet (as hard as they are), but I can't help but look down on wasteful people, they're subsidized by people doing their part (or continents doing their part)

I'll pitch in. Standardize on a strict set of allowed mixtures of plastics (and possibly even colors!). Not just "PP", "ABS" and so on, but exact formulas.

Also, keep the set of allowed formules small.

This will serve two purposes, first, allow plastics to be actually recycled to a greater extent. Now, plastics are very much "mystery" items.

Second, it will reduce the amount of harmful and toxic additives in plastics.

Somehow we also need to stop producing so much junk, electronics which is not durable, packing material within packing material and so on. The externalised costs of so many things are huge, we need to somehow de-externalise the costs.

How do you make China adhere?

Prohibit importing non-compliant goods. Do compliance checking in ports and punish local importers, both companies and their owners/executives, for noncompliance.

I don't think the political will to do this exists. From the perspective of the state we care way more about drugs than we do about plastics, but people have been ordering asthma drugs, psychedelics, stimulants, steroids, and retinoids from Indian pharmacies successfully for at least a decade now, which makes me think that it's a hard problem to solve at scale.

I don't think the political will exists do much of anything which is hard, definitely not to coördinate laws on plastics. But to compare import of stimulants to plastics... I don't think it's the same thing. Nobody is going to gray import a plastic toothbrush from China just to get that extra cadmium.

You don't and they won't.

It comes down to the 3 Rs: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. There's a reason Recycle is the last word in that mantra. It's the most expensive of the three things a person can do. The other two are about habits, and those really are things you have to just decide you want to change.

However what I couldn't find was how much overall waste consumers create vs other sources, just this:

https://discardstudies.com/2016/03/02/municipal-versus-indus...

And it seems to imply that consumer behavior has little direct effect on the overall amount of waste we humans produce. Like, how many people would have to stop drinking canned beverages to see a decrease in bauxite tailings? Probably an unrealistic amount.

> Burning waste still releases harmful toxins into the environment and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions – even if it reduces landfill methane, which is a potent contributor to climate change

This is not axiomatic. The gases from the incineration can be put into productive use (cf. Vienna heating and providing hot water off of their incinerator), and the harmful stuff can be filtered (cf. Vienna where the incinerator is in a dense urban area, and an architectural masterpiece).

Tokyo also has many, many urban incinerators.

Yes they exist and they work. However to build them requires stringent regulations to make them a viable cost solution. If it is ok to blow out the toxic smoke the high end solution will not be built. The best thing is still avoiding waste.

> However to build them requires stringent regulations to make them a viable cost solution

In the US, the EPA has had regulations around this since the late 70's; it's a cost of doing business at this point, not a wild new theoretical rule framework.

> The best thing is still avoiding waste.

Yeah, and the as-yet-unattainable perfect is still the enemy of the currently-attainable good.

> Anyone who thinks recycling plastic is some sort of normative good because "waste is bad" clearly hasn't put any thought into what environmental issues need to be focused on right now.

Thing is, we need to find out ways to remove, reduce and recycle plastics as soon as possible. The US may have enough place to place landfills without impacting anyone, but densely settled Europe does not - we're having the requirement that landfills can only take up 10% of residential waste by 2035, the rest has to be either burned or recycled by then. And for that, we need technology to actually recycle the plastic waste to be ready at industrial scale, so we need to focus on that right now. Sorting trash, separating modern multi layer plastics (sometimes a dozen layers of different materials!), recovering polymer source compounds, a lot of that is still open topics that need to be researched.

Additionally, landfills are already bad for the environment - Grady points out the issue in his video indirectly: the birds eat the food waste from all the packaging and end up distributing (micro)plastic waste across the environment surrounding the landfills, which then ends up in the groundwater and surface water bodies. Also the birds pick up and distribute pathogens from the decomposing waste.

Side note: we also need plastics recycling to reduce our dependency on fresh oil products used to manufacture them. Again, the US has it a bit easier due to self-sufficient domestic oil production, but Europe does not.

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/pdfs/news/expert/2018/4/story...

Europe is not densely populated. There is plenty of empty space, they just have decided to place rules on how that space is used.

The US east of the Mississippi and the far west coast has similar (lower, but not by much) population density. However there is a lot of space in Alaska and west of the Mississippi that almost nobody lives in and that brings down the density measures.

How do you feel about plasma gasification to ensure robust destruction of anything non-inert? I love landfills too! But humans are various shades of tricky, lazy, cost adverse, and untrustworthy (think limited liability) as it pertains to long term custodianship and management of things bad for people and the environment.

TLDR You must engineer around the human. Potentially harmful physical matter that requires waste management? Default to destruction vs storage, if at all possible. You have now defaulted to success instead of failure.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38994374

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722984

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification

The big problem with plastic waste is getting it to the landfill (or incinerator) in the first place.

Once the plastics are captured, I don't see too much benefit in incinerating it beyond freeing up landfill space. But that's really not a major issue as you can always dig a deeper and wider landfill.

In fact, a major downside of incinerating the plastic is you end up with greenhouse gasses as a byproduct.

Certainly, you are generating some greenhouse gasses in the process, which is a trade off to ensure immediate waste destruction. To note, you will have to flare methane from the landfill in perpetuity when landfilled. If one is so inclined, internalize the cost of direct air carbon capture into the cost of waste disposal for those emissions.

https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-ga...

> Municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States, accounting for approximately 14.4 percent of these emissions in 2022. The methane emissions from MSW landfills in 2022 were approximately equivalent to the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from more than 24.0 million gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for one year or the CO2 emissions from more than 13.1 million homes’ energy use for one year. At the same time, methane emissions from MSW landfills represent a lost opportunity to capture and use a significant energy resource.

TLDR Whether landfills or gasification, you are paying the piper regardless for emissions. Don't trust the human, pull forward the disposal.

Point taken. Though I do wonder how much of the methane released is from plastic decomposition and how much of it is from food/biomaterial decomposition. I'd naively assume the primary emission would come from readily decomposable materials and that most plastics would remain fairly stable for a lot longer than yesterday's half eaten hamburger.

Indeed, waste sorting might improve the situation, but all available evidence indicates there is no will to do this (caveats being parts of Europe, Japan, the Nordics, and anywhere else diverse multi stream waste management can be effectively operated), which leads me to believe gasification is the superior path (with a bypass stream for glass, brick, earth, rock, and metals, primarily to prevent process efficiency reduction during gasification but also for reuse of those materials).

Hardly the best solution, but I argue the least worst solution. Landfilling is just too much risk considering leaching from lining failures (putting water tables and aquifers at risk from permanent contamination) and the lifetime of methane destruction that must be accounted for.

What has been successful in my city, Portland, is separating the food and yard waste. The food and yard wastes are composted. Composting produces methane, but there is a trial to capture the methane which is burned as natural gas.

Capturing methane from compost should be easier than whole landfill. It also keeps the organics instead of losing them.

You don't really lose anything in a landfill. You just lock it up for a while.

We can 'mine' landfills in the future, if that becomes economically viable.

A wrinkle I read somewhere - organics in traditional landfills kept toxic materials like heavy metals "locked up", less risk of such stuff leeching out in the ground water.

What benefit would you get from gasification compared to just straight up burning the trash?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification#Advantages

Reads like it's worth than just straight up incineration. At least with current technologies. (Apart from perhaps the installation on that American military ship. Maybe. But that's just because they have unusual requirements.)

I'm generally down on sorting unless you have a lot of one particular type of waste. If you are not generating a full truck worth of that type of waste every week sorting efforts mean more trucks (since the truck with compartments for each type cannot hold as much waste because of the compartments, and also it has to go empty when one compartment fills). Combine that with the need verify the sorting was done correctly and it isn't worth it. We have made trade progress on automated sorting machines that solve a lot of problems - lets instead ban things that cannot be automatically sorted.

You're repeating yourself:

> parts of Europe, Japan, the Nordics

The Nordics are a part of Europe.

DRY! :-)

    > plastic decomposition

As I understand, most plastic is type 1 and 2 (PET bottles and such), and it never decomposes (on any reasonable human timeframe).

Interesting point I hadn't thought of! Had previously thought that obviously things should go straight in the ground to avoid CO2 emissions and hadn't thought about decomposition.

While I might be wrong, I seriously doubt the plastics creating the methane emissions you are referring to. That is almost certainly the organic matter.

I have no idea how you think plasma gasification -- requiring extreme amounts of energy -- is in any way helpful to our current environmental concerns. Unless we somehow magically start relying on 100% renewables, it seems like landfills are far-and-away the best way to go until we are able to grapple with climate change.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/opinion/solar-power-free-...

By the end of this year, the world will be deploying 660GW of solar annually. Within 18 months, that figure rises to 1TW/year (based on current manufacturing ramp trajectories).

On the contrary, I’m unsure how you think we don’t have the clean power for this, not even accounting for the power you can generate from the syngas that is a byproduct of the process. The process is not energy positive, but it’s also not wildly net negative due to the energy content of the matter being gasified.

> Plasma gasification uses around 800 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of power per ton of municipal solid waste (MSW).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01968...

Because solar isn't balanced and we haven't fixed the duck curve. We're burning obscene amounts of nat gas, petroleum, and even coal currently. Until those numbers are at-or-near zero, every ounce of renewable electricity needs to be offsetting dirty electricity.

Think when these plants would come online. Think when solar and storage will be up to speed on the grid. Skate to where the puck is going to be. Think in systems. To say no today because of current state today is irrational and ignores the data. Enough sunlight falls on the Earth within ~30-60 minutes to power all of humanity for a year, and an enormous global clean energy flywheel is coming up to speed (first solar, with batteries right behind).

Yea, this is nonsense.

I've been trying to advocate for slowing climate change since about 2000. I've been to enough city council meetings, and seen enough government promises simply abandoned to know that this is a deeply naive way to just "expect" the world to suddenly become rational.

Let's stop the actively bleeding artery that is actively killing us before we even start to worry some efficiency gains we could get by asking the surgeon to do two things at once.

This is the difference between an environmentalist and an "environmentalist."

We need to fix climate change now. Get to carbon neutral now. Literally nothing else matters much.

It’s not human rationality, it’s cold, hard economics (scoped to renewables and storage uptake). Climate change is already happening, and there is nothing you can do to stop it immediately, just as you will get killed stepping in front of a freight train. You can only build systems that can attempt to outrace it to slow it down (various efforts to achieve net zero in a domain), and then eventually reverse it (an efficient, scalable carbon sequestration solution to existing atmospheric carbon load, powered by clean energy) over the next ~100-150 years.

The more I read about plasma gasification, the more it seems entirely fine and beneficial. The infrastructure just seems fairly expensive.

I would prefer that focus and expense be used to target reducing GHG's in the short run.

A substantial portion of the duck curve problem is overproduction at no-peak hours. Plasma gasification can take that excess strain off the grid and put it to useful work, while even providing a by-product that you can burn in the event that all of your renewables are underperforming, reducing the risk of relying on renewables.

It is literally (part of) a solution to the problem you're bringing up.

I've read up, and you have a good point.

I mostly agree with you. However:

> Because solar isn't balanced and we haven't fixed the duck curve.

Well, landfill management is something you could (mostly) only run whenever you have excess (solar) power on the grid. So it's an excellent consumer for intermittent generators.

> Until those numbers are at-or-near zero, every ounce of renewable electricity needs to be offsetting dirty electricity.

That’s not realistic. You can and probably will have a complete excess of renewable energy on bright and windy days that is well beyond electrical demand, and at the same time rely on baseload power during still nights. Energy storage helps even things out, and plasma gasification is one possible way to store that energy.

The more I read about plasma gasification, the more it seems entirely fine and beneficial. The infrastructure just seems fairly expensive.

First, I agree about methane source is organic matter, not plastics. I think OP would agree.

    > it seems like landfills are far-and-away the best way to go until we are able to grapple with climate change.

If this is true, why do so many different, highly developed nations use garbage incineration for large parts of their waste?

Money. Landfills aren’t cheap to operate and burning also reduces transportation costs.

Incineration ends up being quite profitable in isolation. Take stuff worth negative X$ per ton and turn it into a smaller pile of stuff still worth negative X$ per ton. Generating power is a useful side effect, but not the main reason.

> But that's really not a major issue as you can always dig a deeper and wider landfill.

The submission suggests that landfills ain't dug, but just piled high. Digging a hole costs more time, money and effort than not digging a hole.

Not OP but long been intrigued by possibilities in this domain (ever since Changing World Technologies promised to, um, change the world -- not plasma based but same proposition).

I've yet to see a truly viable solution in this space that can economically compete; it would be nice to see it happen.

Is recycling plastic bad?

What environmental issues need to be focused on right now?

Much plastic recycling is a sham.

1st world business pays 3rd world business to take their plastic for "recycling" (mandatory air quotes). The 1st world gets credit for being a responsible environmentalist. The 3rd world business then dumps the plastic in a river or other convenient but totally not enviro-friendly dumping spot.

It's sort of an open conspiracy at this point. Putting your plastic in the trash may be better for the environment overall.

To self-checkout at my local grocery store, I have to clear a reminder that any soft plastic recycled through the store over the last x years was in fact not recycled and stockpiled around Australia in warehouses “waiting” for it to become economically feasible (it never did)

REDcycle (effectively Australia’s lone large-scale soft plastic recycling effort) folded and it was a big brouhaha

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/jan/30/redcy...

“Recycling” sometimes (often) includes burning it in waste-to-energy incinerators, which emit CO2 and other pollutants just as if the original oil had been burned directly instead of taking a detour via a plastic product. It would be better to put waste plastic in a carbon storage device, a.k.a. a landfill. At least that way we are caching a little bit of easy-access fuel to help re-bootstrap civilization in case of global catastrophe.

Ironically, just from this comment I get the impression that you are misinformed about environmental issues.

Good job taking down that "waste is bad" straw person.

But what about the EU or the EPAs (or a range of other relevant institutions) waste management hierarchy?

It would appear you've just placed almost the entire waste management industry, its regulators, and related academia in the "don't know what they are talking about" pile, which seems somewhat bold.

It was so frustrating when a dude at work was trying to bust my balls for not using the recycling for my plastic bottle. I didn’t have the energy or patience to explain to him how our city has single stream recycling and there was 100% chance that bottle was being shipped overseas, dumped in the ocean or something else way more stupid than just being buried in the city landfill.

I worked in an office with recycling bins where everything was just gathered up and thrown in the dumpster with the rest of the garbage. It wasn't just our cleaning people, either: from my desk I could see the only two parking lot entrances and while the garbage truck came weekly, never once did I see a recycling truck.

likewise at a large office building I'm familiar with

it was said that because employees/building tenants contaminate the recycling bins with unrecyclable items including food waste, there was no point to do anything but combine it into the trash

however the recycling bins were kept presumably to keep people from protesting about trashing everything, and the memory of this news quickly faded

the same goes for recycling bins in downtown toronto - they're so contaminated that they go straight to landfill

PepsiCo did the same thing. Custodians dumped everything into the same bags. Leadership confirmed it all went to the dump. Still had a personal recycle bin crammed under every desk.

This is just corporate virtue signaling.

And/or ass-covering. There might be contracts in place etc.

More likely it costs the building cleaners time & money. No economic benefit for them so they don't bother even if overall there might be a benefit. Incentives need to align.

My town uses the same trucks for both.

You might not be seeing what you think you're seeing, WRT everything going into the same truck. Lots of municipalities (e.g. mine) undertake resource extraction from commingled waste & recycling streams. It isn't the same everywhere, but sometimes it's more efficient to just put the entire waste stream through the same extraction process to recover recyclable materials. The separate receptacles at the client side are obviously redundant, but sometimes those remain from legacy processing arrangements.

I heard this as well. There is a recycling plant that you need to run anyway to separate the waste/rubbish so you might as well use it to get the plastics and cans out. I think there is an argument that while the machine can do it well avoiding the machine does have benefits. This also doesn't work for paper or cardboard as it would get soiled from what I understand.

The real benefit of separate sources is those machines cannot handle things like plastic bags (they get caught in rollers and jam the machine), dirty diapers, and other such weird stuff. Once you get those out of the stream you may as well separate a few other things that are not recyclable so you need less of the expensive separation machines. However you always need sorting machines - people will make mistakes and so you need to verify everything really is recyclable.

Based on the single stream comment, I'm going to assume you're describing an experience in North America, and your assumptions are pretty off base for PET bottles.

Figure 1 in the linked paper gives the raw numbers for where PET bottles end up. [1]

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.13496

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/03/13/fix-recycling-a...

Yep, I've worked in recycling for 6 years and am well aware that there's a lot of broken parts. My point was that if a PET bottle goes into a single stream system, the recycling industry is pretty good at capturing it, baling it, and selling it to a plastics processor. That processor will clean it, pellet it, and sell it as rPET. 85% of PET bottles that end up in curbside single stream end up getting recycled. I'd like that number higher, but it's where things are at the moment. Throw a bottle in the trash, it's getting landfilled/burned. Throw it in recycling, it's most likely getting recycled.

In Australia the whole hard VS soft plastic blew up recently. The REDcycle brand by mayor supermarkets was shown to just collect and store the soft plastic in large warehouses. For bottles there is a refund scheme.

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