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Comment by GuestFAUniverse | Hacker News Reader

Thank your ancestors, who were to lazy to recycle and treat the rest in a thermic process upfront. It bet those landfills could have easily been only one third the size and close to non-toxic.

When generations cheap out, it's always one of the next who suffers. Pains me.

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>Thank your ancestors, who were to lazy to recycle and treat the rest in a thermic process upfront. It bet those landfills could have easily been only one third the size and close to non-toxic.

My municipality is actively looking at how w're gonna get screwed over this right now as our landfill is slated to close in the mid to late 2030s.

There's plenty of idiots alive and affecting policy today who are why we can't come up with solutions. It's a giant goddamn circle of stupid.

Can't landfill it "because environment". Can't burn it "because environment". Can't have the local (because all this stuff is low margin and shipping eats margin) industry that could take a whole lot of this stuff as various feed stocks "because environment". Of course the lying assholes will be right there to tell you that they haven't literally banned X or Y, you just need to comply with requirements that they've carefully written so that there's not actually any suitable site for a new landfill or incineration/power operation in the whole state.

Clearly the only truly sustainable solution is one that doesn't involve listening to certain people.

There's a (relatively) much more sustainable solution right in front of us, commonly used in Europe, that nobody even considers in America because it costs more: burn it at a much higher temperature with specialized equipment (ensuring that combustion byproducts are themselves burned as well), use the resulting power for the grid, and compact the resulting ash in a well-managed landfill (which fills much, much more slowly vs. just throwing in garbage).

Also the ash doesn't catch fire underground

Modern incinerators still get a bad rap even compared to landfill

Can you link to any information about this process? I would think there's always some byproducts, other than just ash?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste-to-energy_plant

From Wikipedia: "Waste-to-energy plants cause less air pollution than coal plants, but more than natural gas plants."

That sounds, uh, pretty good considering the input is garbage! GIGO doesn't apply when it comes to power generation, apparently.

This is clean burning? No outputs beyond h2o and heat to atmosphere?

Well, we'd still expect CO2.

(Do the SO2 and NO2 get scrubbed? And - what else?)

Edit: read the wikipedia link someone gave below. Yes, SO2 and NO2 and particulates are scrubbed. Older incinerators released a fair amount of dioxins, but this is reportedly improved in newer models.

Didn't they discover that a lot of forever chemicals make it past that ?

Besides that downside though it does sound fairly ideal

Recycling is mostly a lie. Plastic can’t really be usefully recycled. Glass would need to be sorted by color, which is infeasible. There is already more paper and cardboard than can be consumed. Clean aluminum and steel containers recycle well, but are not a lot of volume, and don’t burn.

Aluminum and steel are easy to extract from the waste stream, run the waste stream past a magnet to separate the ferrous metals, then run the waste stream past an eddy current separator to separate out the aluminum/copper/zinc.

Recycling household waste is dumb and a massive waste of resources. Burning the trash after extracting the metal would be optimal.

Isn't burying in a landfill better than burning considering the carbon sequestration considerations of burning what will likely be plastic products? At least with burying we are a little bit closer to putting the oil energy back under the surface of the earth vs having it around in the atmosphere.

If you capture the heat from the burning, e.g. to generate electricity, then that can save burning oil/gas/coal instead.

Furthermore, the landfill will usually also generate gasses like methane, which need to be burned off too.

Household waste recycling mostly works if you sort the materials at source. If you have separate bins for glass, metal, and paper+cardboard, all of them can be recycled economically. Plastic recycling only works for industrial waste, as you can't really expect consumers to identify and sort all the different types of plastic.

I agree, we have single stream where I live and just understanding the logistics of how single stream works it’s easy to see that single stream leads to a large portion of recycling material simply being discarded because of the reality of sorting

Strange. And why did paper and cardboard prices go up during COVID and recycling companies asked to _not_ put paper into the rest?

Your statements do not make sense.

Europeans seemed to manage to figure the problem out. It’s a cultural problem, not a scientific one. Because it requires gen pop to accept some sort of civic responsibility to do it properly, something Europeans have much more inkling to do

>Glass would need to be sorted by color, which is infeasible

A 16 year old with an Arduino can do the obvious part, what's the hard part that I'm missing? Scale/volume?

> Glass would need to be sorted by color, which is infeasible

Fortunately we have digital image sensors. Or we can just mix two batches of sand glass to get the desired tone.

The real problem recycling glass is everything that is not glass. Just a tiny dirt will start a crack in the bottle. If your bottle has some soil on it, dumping it with the non recycling lot is the more polite and correct behavior

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