Just Bury Your Trash | Hacker News Reader

Just Bury Your Trash

worksinprogress.co

18 pointsmellosouls17 comments

US centric viewpoints. The UK is running out of space for landfills. Burning it is best for all.

And reuse better.

Ridiculous bag analogy they use - I think we all have a bunch of plastic bags as it's easy to forget to take one out - much better if I remembered a cotton one.

> In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic

So after a couple years? How is this supposed to be an argument in favor of disposable bags? My reusable ones are just fine after probably at least a decade.

Likewise with the mug; ignoring for a moment that drinking out of a polystyrene cup is disgusting (especially with hot liquids like coffee that one normally uses a mug for), the argument is supposed to be that a mug (a thing that should last a lifetime) is somehow worse than disposable cups because it takes 2-3 years to be better purely on an energy basis?

And the milk bottle: okay, it takes 10 trips to be better; ChatGPT says various sources say a typical bottle lasts 10-30 trips. So it's better. What even is the argument here?

The first two steps are reduce and reuse, after all. Recycle is last.

I was just about to write the same comment about cotton grocery bags. I have been using mine every week for a decade, and they were second-hand, so they're even older than that. I think most people underestimate the durability of even cheap consumer products as long as you treat them with respect and tolerate a little cosmetic wear. Fast fashion is supposed to literally fall apart after less than 10 wears, which is completely outside my lived experience, even as someone who used to shop at such outlets and has received many a cheap swag t-shirt.

The article points out that some things like low quality plastics are hard to recycle (and I guess they break and are hard to reuse), perhaps that's a sign that we shouldn't use them.

Knowing a cotton bag needs a put 170 uses to pay come out on top of plastic bags is a reminder to use those bags more, if I had one with me most of the time I could do that in a year and stop accumulating "bag for life" plastic bags.

I saved my plastic bags and used them as trash bags for the little bin in my bathroom. Now that my city banned single-use grocery bags, I have to buy actual trash bags made up of even thicker plastic. So those of us that use trash bags will never reach a break even point for cloth bags. Every day that we are forced to use them just adds to the already substantial energy gap that existed at day 0.

This feels like very low quality propaganda.

Like at one point it spends a whole paragraph on how landfills are better than just spreading trash around randomly.

Is there someone out there seriously arguing that developing nations should just recycle and entirely skip modern landfills?

Are they implicitly arguing that the US has a developing nation level of civic infrastructure?

Is there someone out there seriously arguing that developing nations should just recycle and entirely skip modern landfills?

It's even worse than that. There are a bunch of nonprofits that are spending their limited funds building recycling infrastructure in developing countries where they could get a much greater ROI (in terms of environmental preservation and quality of life for the people who live there) by putting that money toward building traditional landfills.

In fact, there is no longer enough waste in China to burn, so they have even started digging up previously buried waste to generate electricity.

This article disingenuously ignores reuse of a reusable asset. The argument falls apart as soon as higher quality things are made with reuse in mind. You don’t throw cotton bags away after the first use.

Single use plastics are a colossal waste of resources and cause environmental damage when not correctly disposed of. That reason alone should render their use outlawed.

Do note this is a Koch Bros pro-fossil publication. It'll call out some externalities but not others.

Do you have a source for that? I wasn't able to verify it

about page - senior editor is a board member of Mercatus Group which is Koch funded

Dropped some stuff off at a landfill a few weeks ago. Place was a mess, made me feel like a dirty human.

I did the same in June. The single most foul place I've ever been. I didn't see 20 decaying rhino carcasses, but I certainly smelled them.

Now imagine all that garbage strewn across three counties indiscriminately. Landfills, as the subject matter expert pointed out to you in the article, are just about the safest way to manage the dumpster fire that is manmade solid waste. Wastewater treatment plants smell bad and are usually in some state of disrepair also, but that doesn't mean dumping your shit in the lake is better. If you truly believe in improving how we manage waste, ask your politicians to expand the budget for it and let the experts decide what is correct.

I wasn't disagreeing with the article, simply saying that it still didn't make me feel good.

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