This all makes tons of sense. Recycling metal works, other recycling may not. Cloth bags make sense if you have a few of them and use them hundreds of times. Reduce still makes sense so why not focus on reduce.
I think you misread the Wikipedia page. Plasma gasification air emissions are cleaner with costs being somewhat higher than incineration. Plasma gasification breaks matter down at the molecular level versus combustion of incineration. With plasma gasification, you are paying more to end with a more inert end material and reduced hazardous process byproducts.
I interpret "can be cleaner than X and similar to that of Y" to mean "inferior to that of Y, but kinda close". Otherwise, it would be "cleaner than X and Y".
A good example is a old PCB board with Lead solder thrown carelessly into the trash
A incinerator gets hot enough to melt organics, but it won't turn the lead into gas
Instead the lead will end up in either the exhaust gases or in the ashes. These ashes will be thrown into a landfill. Over the course of 10,000 years these landfills will end up leaching this lead into groundwater supplies and ending up in our food, soil and in plants.
Plasmification on the other hand, this lead ends up encased in a slag, and will remain that way easily for millions of years. The lead atoms will be locked in a obsidian glasslike rock.
All the bad stuff like heavy metals etc... will end up in the soil for a incinerator, Organics like plastic will be broken down into their base elements carbon/oxygen/nitrogen/water
While all the bad stuff gets encased in slag for Plasmification
Hopefully energy used will become less important. CO2 emissions seem like the biggest threat to our long term health. Microplastics also matter, a bit.
How much plastic is escaping into the environment from the recycling process vs. landfill? What are the CO2 output of landfill vs. recycling? I imagine burning would be the worst option for these.
Not surprised that the market forces tended towards the most energy efficient waste disposal systems; glad we don't have mountains of trash or poor landfills.
I don't remember energy use being the problem with plastic bags?
It was plastic bags being absolutely everywhere in the environment. Streets, parks, trees. Wrapped around anything sticking out of the ground. On your face on a windy day.
Pollution is the problem with plastic. Probably health, too, now that microplastics are being recognized as an issue.
But the pollution problem from plastic bags is solved equally well if we bury them or recycle them. Provided your municipality doesn't just dump trash in the nearest river which is an issue in some parts of the world.
Since we can't get 100% compliance in rich countries and poor countries can't afford landfills that's a good reason to not use plastic. But it's not a good reason to have plastic recycling programs.
> But the pollution problem from plastic bags is solved equally well if we bury them or recycle them
We can't even reliably trust people to put the plastic bags in a bin and have that bin be cleanly collected and yet you're expecting people to bury them??
No, the solution is to massively reduce how often we use single-use plastic bags. It seems like every time I buy anything from any store its just assumed I want it in a plastic bag. Getting a single bottled drink at a convenience store? The clerk gets a plastic bag ready. Its insane.
I can remember when there would be drifts of these bags caught in fence lines, trees, sewer grates etc.
Before bag bans there were SO MANY of these things everywhere.
There’s a whole scene about the beauty of plastic shopping bags in “American Beauty” in 1996. The whole point was finding beauty in something that was so common that you walk by it every day.
> Provided your municipality doesn't just dump trash in the nearest river which is an issue in some parts of the world.
Is this really true? I doubt it. In developing countries, there are lots of informal settlements are built along rivers. They have no municipal trash service, so a lot of garbage is burned locally (in a pit or oil drum) or is thrown in the river.
Fixing the municipal waste system seems like the "add another system" school of engineering. As someone who works in poorly organized, poorly funded projects, I generally subscribe more to the "remove the problematic part of the existing system" school.
Getting rid of single-use wherever possible removes the broken part. I agree that we should also add more systems like proper waste disposal, but it's more complexity to count on.
Another point, to counter the " plastic bags are cheap, cotton is expensive" argument, is that most of the reusable bags are plastic too. They are way cheaper to produce than cotton bags, and earn their keep within about 5 to 10 uses as opposed to 100 or whatever the crazy figure was for cotton bags.
You can use single use plastic bag 50 times or more before it deteriorates, not the thinnest kind, but the average one. They are incredibly strong. The dedicated mult-use ones are insanely strong, but also few times thicker and more unwieldy.
Like with single use shaving razor. They don't need to be literally single use. It depends on the user. You can use it as long as it serves you.
The best thing limiting access to plastic bags did was familiarizing people with the idea of taking bags to the market.
If this is really true, why does Gillette advertise their high-end, multi-blade razors as multi-use? For their top product, they say "up to 20 comfortable shaves".
My state did away with bags a few years ago, and you now never see bags blowing around or stuck on trees. It also seems everyone stopped complaining about it once we got over the hump of "remember to bring your bags".
So we are just left with a small group of old timers who would probably bring back metal tab cans if they could complaining about it.
I've had a vague thought that I wish grocery stores would kind of standardize their bags (you have to use theirs) and just put a passive RFID in them and make them more expensive, but make them nicer, with maybe specific bags for specific use cases (sturdy for fruits, lining for things that need to stay cold). So it would just be a cost that you pay as part of getting a bag ($3) and you get it fully refunded in when you bring it back.
It would mean you don't have to remember to carry the bag all day (which is fine if you drive, but a pain if you use public transit and have to carry bags everywhere). Just "check one out" if you don't have one, bring them back and they will be reused (and you credited) for returning them (or just reuse them yourself, if you want).
This may partially be driven by my mother, who has like 7 different types of bags that she takes to the local HEB. It is always a little song and dance with the bagger about which things go in which of her bags. These are true first world problems, but it just makes me consider alternatives.
Also, minor, but if the bags were actually "valuable", then it would encourage the homeless who find discarded bags to collect them and return them themselves, which helps with the "visible garbage" problem.
These are idiot thoughts of mine, but I do sometimes wonder about alternatives.
Right. This seems to be written by someone who has never been outside and seen the amount of plastic alongside roads or caught in bushes etc. And this is in a country that is supposed to be good at collecting waste.
It's a conspicuous part. But energy use is still a problem. Like, maybe hi-kicking people throwing thrash everywhere would be cheaper solution then letting them do it, but with paper instead of PET. If we won't calculate we can't be sure
Personally I think this problem is being solved the right way from a systems perspective.
Energy production is centralized, so the benefits of it becoming cleaner is spread as soon as it arrives, whereas single-use plastic pollution is diffuse, with compounding damage.
I do. I remember arguing "you just want this requirement for aesthetic reasons, you're enforcing your aesthetic values", and getting told no, no, it's a way to fight climate change. There was also something about dolphins eating the single use bags.
Yes… I don't think the author is thinking on a long enough time horizon.
I'm curious what happens to these landfill sites in 100, 1000 and 10k years. Do they inevitably break down and leak into the water table? Do they eventually stop off-gassing and become inert? Do they become fossilized layers of sediment on a long enough horizon? If we maintain our current waste levels, how much land is required by the year 3000?
These landfills will eventually breakdown and leak, dumping microplastics and dangerous chemicals into the groundwater which in turn will poison the people drinking from wells, and will float up during heavy rains to poison the plants.
thousands of years becomes a long time, it makes more economic sense to burn it for energy, rather than performing a thousand years of inspections and repairs for every landfill
The argument that is pro-polyethylene plastic bags over cotton completely ignores the source: Renewable plants that are grown and harvested, vs. finite fossil fuels extracted from the Earth and refined.
> Instead of a simple blowing and sealing process, the cotton must be made into yarn, woven into fabric, prepared, dried, sized, dyed, and finished, which takes around 1,725 megajoules, around 3,050 times as much energy.
That conveniently ignores the drilling, extracting, transporting, refining, and transporting again to make "polyethylene resin".
The energy requirements for growing cotton being largely the sun, and a resource which makes up most of the universe (yes, I know water is several steps from hydrogen). ((And the tangentials like the fertilizers, dieslel etc.))
Compared to the energy requirements of petroleum based products: Incredible density and pressure acting on sufficient organic matter(thousands of times greater than growing cotton), on millenium time scales, then requiring several incredibly expensive and commoditization refining/distribution practices, and the end product is then ceremoniously burned off as poison or discarded into the aether.
It is 100 percent the "gotcha OP thought it is". However I do see/realize the fallacy you're pointing out in that the lesser of two evils is still evil.
I think the main point is that this post is not a good faith attempt to convince people otherwise. It's a shoddly researched opinion piece that has little to no merit as it ignores the complexities of producing either item.
Broadly, I agree with your comment. I have seen a few experimental plastic drink bottles that claim to have a minimum percent produced from plants. It is a little bit insane to imagine the amount of chemical and energy gymnastics required to make plastic bottles from plants, but, hey, the big drinks companies are desparate not to loose PET bottles. To be clear: I am not defending this type of plastic! I am only pointing out that it does exist.
> That conveniently ignores the drilling, extracting, transporting, refining, and transporting again to make "polyethylene resin".
This is really the key point! There are comparing apples to oranges.
Somewhat adjacent, in many rich countries, in the last 10 years there has been a big push to remove plastic drink straws. I think it might have worked. Initially, the designs and performance of wax coated paper straws were pretty terrible, but chemists and material scientists have been working hard to improve the product. I feel like paper-ish drink straws are here to stay.
My grocery store now uses slightly thicker plastic bags, and I've found that you con reuse them dozens of times; I've had the same bags in my car for over a year.
Unfortunately, when they deliver, they use brand-new bags, and they don't accept them back for reuse, so a lot of them get thrown away after a single use.
Can you use the cotton bag 173 times? Cotton wears out over time. They also didn't ask about the cost of washing the cotton bag, which really should be done once in a while since they collect dirt and food particles - this will increase the times you need to use the bag. (it isn't clear if it lasts longer with or without washing - dirt is often sharp enough to wear the bag, but washing also puts wear on them)
Similar for the cup - I've dropped and broke several ceramic cups in my life - and I don't drink coffee/tea. Those cups will never get another use since the shards are scrap.
> Can you use the cotton bag 173 times? Cotton wears out over time.
Yeah, comfortably. Shopping bags don't actually get much "wear" in each active use period. The main issue will be the handles but good stitching will solve that.
And it'll go in the washing machine with your clothes (though you might want to tie the handles together).
I have a Lidl bag that is already into the sixties of usage (it has been my food shopping bag for more than a year).
I have other two reusable bags made from recycled polyester (so recycled plastic bottles and plastic bags) that have seen probably 1800 uses each, maybe more, in their lifetime.
This material is probably a better choice for reusable shopping bags anyway; it can be made from plastic that can't be reused for food grade, it's incredibly tough, it folds down small etc.
I can confirm: Easily. While I don't like the feel as much (the scrunching plastic sound is awful compared to natural fibers), PET bottles that are recycled to make reusable bags are incredibly tough. I had one that I used for 15 years(!) for multiple shops per week.
> a mug 1,000 times to beat disposable cups sounds completely reasonable.
Small nitpick here: A mug needs to be cleaned and washed after each use. (Certainly in commercial settings.) However, a reusable grocery bag probably gets washed at max: once per month. Still: I love it when a bar goes out of the way to use mugs/glasses instead of disposal cups!
It's much more the case that we ship plastic to be recycled to other countries than trash. The problem is that then the unrecyclable plastic mixed in often ends up in rivers.
Can you give a specific example of a rich country that is "ship[ping] trash over to low-income countries" in 2026? It must be a tiny minority at this point.
Burning waste is listed in the article as an even better for the environment, but somewhat more expensive method.
The methane that landfills produce is routinely captured and burned for power, they may otherwise flare it off before it can contribute to the greenhouse effect. This is also mentioned in the article.
The thing with methane is that it has a lifespan of something like 10 years in the atmosphere before it breaks down to CO2 + water, while CO2 persists for centuries. I suspect that burning would release more net CO2 than emitting the methane and having it eventually break down to CO2.
> A molecule of methane traps more heat than a molecule of CO2, but methane has a relatively short lifespan of 7 to 12 years in the atmosphere. CO2 can persist for hundreds of years or more.
In the Netherlands the cradle to cradle hype of some years ago has created a paper reality where waste is turned magically into building material and can thus be effectively dumped anywhere in the environment.
I don't understand this comment. As I understand, many types of incineration (coal, garbage, etc.) produces some amount of fly ash. This can be used when making concrete. I think that is a good way to dispose of fly ash.
Kinnaman, Thomas C. "Determining the Socially Optimal Recycling Rate." Resources, Conservation and Recycling, vol. 85, 2014, pp. 5–10, doi:10.1016/j.resconrec.2013.11.002.
> A returnable milk bottle takes much more energy to produce and much more fuel to transport than a plastic carton, and has to make around ten or more trips to use less energy than a bottle made from polyethylene plastic.
This seems like the weakest of presented arguments. Just 10 trips and it's more environmentally friendly? Yeah, seems like reusable milk bottles wins over plastic. That's what, ~10 weeks for payback?
These arguments tend to ignore that a reusable thing is often just a lot better at whatever it does. You can put a few liters of milk in a reusable bag without triple bagging it. You don't have to worry that it will split open and spill out on the ground. You can use the bag to pack for road trips, to store kid's snacks and toys, as a gym bag, etc. Groceries aren't the only thing anyone caries and people go further than between their boot and fridge.
In Switzerland grocery stores have been promoting reusable (recycled plastic) bags for years, and people use them for everything: I saw someone in Interlaken carrying firewood with one.
So:
- To people promoting reuse: maybe go beyond the environmental impact and appeal to quality of life. Having bag or two in your boot all the time is a good idea.
- To people promoting single use: others have pointed out that you need to address the other environmental problems beyond energy, but also acknowledge that you're asking people to find a replacement for their everyday tote bags as well.
The article mentions the energy benefits from recycling aluminium but fails to mention the also large (but not as large) savings from recycling glass. Please recycle your aluminium and glass even if it's probably wiser to throw out plastic in most localities.
Penn & Teller have a Bullshit! episode about this (Season 2, Episode 5). Well, it's technically about recycling, but it makes the claim that landfills are not a bad thing, and much better than the current recycling situation, in most cases.
That episode has always stuck with me, and I've always wondered how valid their argument is.
I remember watching that as a young teen with a libertarian bent. As an old man who no longer identifies as libertarian that episode for some reason has stuck with me as the arguments were pretty compelling. I agree and would like to know if the calculations have changed today or if their argument is still valid.
Their argument was NEVER valid, Penn and Teller never addressed how long this trash actually takes to break down (Estimates are as high as 10,000) years. This means for 10,000 years you would need to inspect the landfill every year, and repair it when the landfill breaks.
In actuality what will happen is that all these buried landfills will break, all the bad stuff will leak out and enter the ground water. The groundwater becomes polluted, the plants start dying. And you end up with dead dirt that nothing will grow in.
The people advocating for landfills now, are not going to be around 500 years from now to see the results of their selfish thinking.
The primary issue is that we took elements naturally found in nature and used them to create manmade synthetic material, that nature has no tools to deal with. And these manmade synthetic material will eventually break down small enough to the point where quantum forces take over (nanoscale sized particles) and enter the groundwater. And plants and animals will drink in these manmade synthetic materials the size of nanometers, and the body has nothing that can breakdown or deal with these manmade synthetic materials. Putting a piece of shit into icecream and mixing it is easy. Unmixing a icecream mixed with shit to remove the shit is scientifically impossible.
For billions of years, high-density elements (lead, cadmium, mercury, rare earth elements, arsenic) were locked away in solid mineral ores, buried under hundreds of feet of rock. Surface biology only ever encountered them as faint, background trace elements.
We mined gigatons of these ores, refined them to near-100% purity, combined them with synthetic chemicals, and packed them into hyper-dense landfill cells right above or near freshwater aquifers.
In an apartment, I’ve learned not to even have a garbage bin. If I have garbage I make a small bag and throw it out, or keep it in the freezer until I go out. Frozen trash doesn’t smell and doesn’t attract anything :)
Of course, this requires you to have less trash , which is very easy if you simply take a few seconds to go outside and throw your food out after lunch/dinner. Everything else is just dry scraps usually. There’s always the fridge :)
All in all, there is no concept of “garbage”, “garbage bin” , or any kind of “garbage accumulation” in my apartments.
Oh, you can also just freaking flush small things down the toilet. Seriously, it’s like a little mini garbage. Only advise this for people with great water pressure (lucky you!).
If I had a backyard, I’d be burning and burying garbage too, man.
Last but not least, never ever buy expensive garbage bags. It’s literally going in the garbage, man.
Using the toilet in this manner is the worst option. You’re sending your trash straight into the water treatment system let alone damaging your building pipes and whatnot, though it sounds like you rent.
I respect the approach and find it fascinating even though I think it’s crazy aha. I don’t think this would be very compatible at all with a lot of people’s cooking habits or hobbies, etc. Or if your apartment complex has an inconvenient garbage disposal location.
And there’s a lot of garbage I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting in the freezer.
How do you handle bathroom trash? I’m thinking feminine hygiene products specifically. Surely you don’t recommend flushing those right?
>Oh, you can also just freaking flush small things down the toilet.
People with this attitude are why the drains in my apartment keep backing up and my landlord sends emails threatening to evict whoever's flushing things they shouldn't.
"In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic. Denmark’s equivalent public body estimated a similar ratio."
I think there's a thing about food shopping here. Americans just don't go shopping as frequently, so you're better off with paper bags in the back of your car.
I am a Brit. I have a Lidl cotton bag that I've probably used sixty times already. It augments and will ultimately replace two reusable foldable/pocketable bags from Marks & Spencer that I have used for all of my shopping for at least thirteen years, perhaps more like sixteen.
I shop on foot, about once every four or five days. I wil have used the two M&S bags on more than a thousand journeys. One of them is finally wearing thin. The other goes in my pocket more or less whenever I leave the house. They were themselves made from recycled material.
I use two the majority of the time so I am confident I've avoided using at least 1800 plastic bags.
(Weird timing, but I did end up needing one last night, annoyingly, because I had to shop in an emergency, but it is the first time in five years or so and it already has a reuse purpose)
Reusable shopping bags are easy. A British shopper might even get to 173 uses in a single year.
Such a reductive title/framing. Yes, plastic recycling doesn't work very well. But that doesn't mean that getting rid of trash is simple/there aren't opportunities to reduce waste. Metal recycling, compost, glass bottle reuse, and proper management of landfills are all super important!
Also:
> In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic.
They make it seem like this is a bad thing but surely the average cotton bag gets used more than 173 times. I've probably used some of my oldest reusable bags like ~1k times.
The authors think reusing a cotton bag for 173 times is difficult - that's all we need to say about this article. When recommendation for landfilling comes from this kind of sources, I think we can safely assume we are doing absolutely great with our demands to reuse, repair and recycle!
I imagine part of what makes it difficult is that people can and do reuse plastic bags. If I reuse a plastic bag 20 times before it breaks then you now have to reuse your cotton bag 3460 times, which is much harder.
One argument for PET packaging bans is that there are people for whom the discipline of disposal is hard. If it's true, than re-using cotton bags for 173 times is hard - on average level, not for you personally.
> a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic
So what? That's like a year of grocery shopping maybe. I easily use a tote bag for way longer than that and I'm not trying that hard to live an environment friendly life.
I am still not sold on those reusable plastic bottles and how these are better for environment and health then regular soda bottles.
I use maybe one PET water bottle each month when i go for outdoor activities. PET bottle i would buy anyway even if i had reusable one, because i've got stuck somewhere without running water or because i craved bottled icetea or orange juice. After carefully rinsing it. I keep using it for month or so and then dispose it. I only use it for clean tap water. No sugar or anything that might promote unnecessary microbial growth. Non-abrasive rinsing. Store with lid off when not in use.
These are usualy made locally in soda bottling companies, so the shipping is cheaper and more ecological than shipping reusable bottles from one central reusable bottle factory (likely abroad). This makes me feel zero guilt when i finaly decide it's used enough to be disposed.
Quite often these are reasonably sturdy to be used for months if you keep them in backpack and don't throw them around too much. And the reusable bottles get damaged over time as well if you don't treat them right.
Reusable bottle people say something about how refilling that water bottle make it leak BPA or whatever chemicals. That's just insane. I've seen huge grocery market chains storing pallets of those in direct sunlight for months, yet somehow magically that's not leaking enough to violate any regulatory limits. But me puting pure tap water into the bottle automaticaly makes it extremely nasty hormonal disruptor according to some people.
On the other hand, i would like to see some sensible regulation on amount of packaging materials vs amount of product these are holding. Shrinkflation and cost cutting caused some products to be ridiculously small compared to amount of packaging they need. (especialy when you realize the relationship between volume of product and surface area covered by packaging is geometricaly increasing the packaging to product ratio when shrinking down). Sometimes it kinda makes sense (pills/medications), sometimes it's kinda stupid (100ml water bottles - and yes, i am aware of airplanes and conference rooms).
"Instead of paying more to recycle, we could spend that money far more effectively on other environmental mitigation measures like carbon capture."
Yeah, let's stop doing the fairly well established recycling programs that have knock on benefits like reducing pollution, and instead start scaling an entirely unproven and expensive mitigation program.
These are some prominent Effect Altruism guys so I know "cause prioritization" is their whole thing. But I think this is just basic contrarianism, because you cant fundraise off the fact that the cultural shift to recycling in the first world has been pretty successful and positive.
The push for recycling has been successful at making people feel better about themselves, not successful at saving energy or raw materials. The article also goes on at length about this, but most of what's put in recycling bins gets thrown out anyways and folks regularly put stuff in recycling bins that can't be recycled, just increasing the cost of recycling programs while lowering their effectiveness. Recycling metal cans and containers is a no brainer, recycling most plastics is of questionable value bordering on actively harmful[1].
"The real solution is to switch to systems of reuse and refill," Ramsden said. "We are at a decision point on plastic pollution. It is time for corporations to turn off the plastic tap."
"Just Bury Your Trash" is arguing "Turn the plastic tap on more please, and don't even bother TRYING to recycle it".
> "Instead of paying more to recycle, we could spend that money far more effectively on other environmental mitigation measures like carbon capture."
Carbon capture is a scam to allow fossil consumption to continue as is. The only path forward is rapid destruction of fossil fuel demand and transitioning to clean energy and electric mobility. At this time, there is no effective technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Like lets think about plastic bags from an object use standpoint. Given you have a collection of stuff to carry would you prefer:
A) A reasonably sturdy bag that can be styled to your preference (like with art or whatever) that you have to remember to bring with you when you need.
B) The literal minimum possible material to be considered a bag. Even money whatever you put into it will punch straight through the bottom, or you'll need to use 2-4 nested bags anyway. And it'll be uncomfortable to hold the whole time.
I think from an object use perspective a reusable bag is more pleasant to use.
But embodied energy calculations are convenient because you can get numbers to compare. But it ignores externalities.
Like if you actually considered the embodied energy of the median tote bag vs the median plastic bag from the point that it was extracted from the ground to the point that it returns to dust, I think the story would look really different. I'll bet a sizable percentage of plastic bags don't even make it through their first use. Meanwhile I've got tote bags that I think are fully 15 years old. Plus if you consider the remediation future generations will need to do for plastic bags. meanwhile I can actually bury a cotton tote bag in the dirt to decompose and it doesn't need infrastructure to prevent poisoning the water supply.
Did the authors consider the embodied energy of the landfill itself? Shipping? Trash collection? Ongoing monitoring? The embodied energy of the future carbon capture system?
It's just so convenient to look only at the materials, equate that to kg of co2, and use that for whatever narrative makes you feel good.
As somebody who cycles as a primary form of transport, I prefer plastic. It weighs less, it's more compact, and it's waterproof (important when it's raining). If I had to use cotton that would incentivize using a car instead. It's not a huge difference, but it doesn't take many marginal cyclists switching to cars to wipe out all the theoretical environmental benefits of cotton.
That's great! Genuinely, I think you should keep doing that.
My point was not actually about plastic vs reusable. My point was, why is embodied energy always used in contrarian climate arguments. Why not talk about ergonomics, or the "bike waterproof-ness standard"?
I think embodied energy is being used in this article to push the author's specific views, which to fund atmospheric carbon extraction.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 35.9 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
InEnTec says its plasma technology effectively destroys PFAS - https://www.wastetodaymagazine.com/news/inentec-says-its-pla... - August 23rd, 2024
Production of high quality syngas from argon plasma gasification of plastic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41623879 (September 2024) (0 comments)
Plasma gasification versus incineration of plastic waste: Energy, economic and environmental analysis - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fuproc.2022.107470
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38994374
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722984
> Air emissions can be cleaner than landfills and similar to that of incinerators.
> Large initial investment costs relative to that of alternatives, including [...] incineration.
> Operational costs are high relative to that of incineration.
A good example is a old PCB board with Lead solder thrown carelessly into the trash
A incinerator gets hot enough to melt organics, but it won't turn the lead into gas
Instead the lead will end up in either the exhaust gases or in the ashes. These ashes will be thrown into a landfill. Over the course of 10,000 years these landfills will end up leaching this lead into groundwater supplies and ending up in our food, soil and in plants.
Plasmification on the other hand, this lead ends up encased in a slag, and will remain that way easily for millions of years. The lead atoms will be locked in a obsidian glasslike rock.
All the bad stuff like heavy metals etc... will end up in the soil for a incinerator, Organics like plastic will be broken down into their base elements carbon/oxygen/nitrogen/water
While all the bad stuff gets encased in slag for Plasmification
China cracked the pollution issues of burning trash, and built a lot of high-temperature incinerator to burn trash and generate electricity.
The overcapacity leads to a shortage(!) of new trash to burn, and it has started to dig out landfills accumulated from the past decades.
The video from Asianometry is very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuIEBSb2xiE
How much plastic is escaping into the environment from the recycling process vs. landfill? What are the CO2 output of landfill vs. recycling? I imagine burning would be the worst option for these.
Not surprised that the market forces tended towards the most energy efficient waste disposal systems; glad we don't have mountains of trash or poor landfills.
It was plastic bags being absolutely everywhere in the environment. Streets, parks, trees. Wrapped around anything sticking out of the ground. On your face on a windy day.
Pollution is the problem with plastic. Probably health, too, now that microplastics are being recognized as an issue.
Since we can't get 100% compliance in rich countries and poor countries can't afford landfills that's a good reason to not use plastic. But it's not a good reason to have plastic recycling programs.
We can't even reliably trust people to put the plastic bags in a bin and have that bin be cleanly collected and yet you're expecting people to bury them??
No, the solution is to massively reduce how often we use single-use plastic bags. It seems like every time I buy anything from any store its just assumed I want it in a plastic bag. Getting a single bottled drink at a convenience store? The clerk gets a plastic bag ready. Its insane.
We can, or more precisely it depends on culture norms. Places where littering is rare do exist.
I can remember when there would be drifts of these bags caught in fence lines, trees, sewer grates etc.
Before bag bans there were SO MANY of these things everywhere.
There’s a whole scene about the beauty of plastic shopping bags in “American Beauty” in 1996. The whole point was finding beauty in something that was so common that you walk by it every day.
The state government response was to ban the ban of plastic bags.
You forgot the biggest and probably the most sensitive dump: the (deep) sea.
Getting rid of single-use wherever possible removes the broken part. I agree that we should also add more systems like proper waste disposal, but it's more complexity to count on.
Like with single use shaving razor. They don't need to be literally single use. It depends on the user. You can use it as long as it serves you.
The best thing limiting access to plastic bags did was familiarizing people with the idea of taking bags to the market.
So we are just left with a small group of old timers who would probably bring back metal tab cans if they could complaining about it.
It would mean you don't have to remember to carry the bag all day (which is fine if you drive, but a pain if you use public transit and have to carry bags everywhere). Just "check one out" if you don't have one, bring them back and they will be reused (and you credited) for returning them (or just reuse them yourself, if you want).
This may partially be driven by my mother, who has like 7 different types of bags that she takes to the local HEB. It is always a little song and dance with the bagger about which things go in which of her bags. These are true first world problems, but it just makes me consider alternatives.
Also, minor, but if the bags were actually "valuable", then it would encourage the homeless who find discarded bags to collect them and return them themselves, which helps with the "visible garbage" problem.
These are idiot thoughts of mine, but I do sometimes wonder about alternatives.
Energy production is centralized, so the benefits of it becoming cleaner is spread as soon as it arrives, whereas single-use plastic pollution is diffuse, with compounding damage.
I'm curious what happens to these landfill sites in 100, 1000 and 10k years. Do they inevitably break down and leak into the water table? Do they eventually stop off-gassing and become inert? Do they become fossilized layers of sediment on a long enough horizon? If we maintain our current waste levels, how much land is required by the year 3000?
thousands of years becomes a long time, it makes more economic sense to burn it for energy, rather than performing a thousand years of inspections and repairs for every landfill
> Instead of a simple blowing and sealing process, the cotton must be made into yarn, woven into fabric, prepared, dried, sized, dyed, and finished, which takes around 1,725 megajoules, around 3,050 times as much energy.
That conveniently ignores the drilling, extracting, transporting, refining, and transporting again to make "polyethylene resin".
It also ignores the energy requirements to grow the cotton. This isn't the gotcha you think it is.
Compared to the energy requirements of petroleum based products: Incredible density and pressure acting on sufficient organic matter(thousands of times greater than growing cotton), on millenium time scales, then requiring several incredibly expensive and commoditization refining/distribution practices, and the end product is then ceremoniously burned off as poison or discarded into the aether.
It is 100 percent the "gotcha OP thought it is". However I do see/realize the fallacy you're pointing out in that the lesser of two evils is still evil.
(1) assuming a HN submission and the discussion around it is in good faith/informed on the topic
(2) Arguing about said topic and not the merits of the submission/discussion
Somewhat adjacent, in many rich countries, in the last 10 years there has been a big push to remove plastic drink straws. I think it might have worked. Initially, the designs and performance of wax coated paper straws were pretty terrible, but chemists and material scientists have been working hard to improve the product. I feel like paper-ish drink straws are here to stay.
however i have never re-used a paper bag because they are awfully loud and cannot be compressed. it is the worst kind of bag.
Unfortunately, when they deliver, they use brand-new bags, and they don't accept them back for reuse, so a lot of them get thrown away after a single use.
Similar for the cup - I've dropped and broke several ceramic cups in my life - and I don't drink coffee/tea. Those cups will never get another use since the shards are scrap.
Yeah, comfortably. Shopping bags don't actually get much "wear" in each active use period. The main issue will be the handles but good stitching will solve that.
And it'll go in the washing machine with your clothes (though you might want to tie the handles together).
I have a Lidl bag that is already into the sixties of usage (it has been my food shopping bag for more than a year).
I have other two reusable bags made from recycled polyester (so recycled plastic bottles and plastic bags) that have seen probably 1800 uses each, maybe more, in their lifetime.
This material is probably a better choice for reusable shopping bags anyway; it can be made from plastic that can't be reused for food grade, it's incredibly tough, it folds down small etc.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/vCeyDb9tbm29zr549
It's much more the case that we ship plastic to be recycled to other countries than trash. The problem is that then the unrecyclable plastic mixed in often ends up in rivers.
Fixed that for you.
My municipality is staring down getting screwed bad in the 2030s so I've gone down the rabbit hole.
https://www.energimyndigheten.se/en/news/2025/from-waste-to-...
My understanding is that biological decomposition of waste creates methane which is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2.
The methane that landfills produce is routinely captured and burned for power, they may otherwise flare it off before it can contribute to the greenhouse effect. This is also mentioned in the article.
[1] https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/meth...
> A molecule of methane traps more heat than a molecule of CO2, but methane has a relatively short lifespan of 7 to 12 years in the atmosphere. CO2 can persist for hundreds of years or more.
Tierney:
"The Reign of..." https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/the-reign-...
Kinnaman:
"Is it Time to..." https://www.vox.com/2016/2/13/10972986/recycling
Kinnaman, Thomas C. "Determining the Socially Optimal Recycling Rate." Resources, Conservation and Recycling, vol. 85, 2014, pp. 5–10, doi:10.1016/j.resconrec.2013.11.002.
This seems like the weakest of presented arguments. Just 10 trips and it's more environmentally friendly? Yeah, seems like reusable milk bottles wins over plastic. That's what, ~10 weeks for payback?
In Switzerland grocery stores have been promoting reusable (recycled plastic) bags for years, and people use them for everything: I saw someone in Interlaken carrying firewood with one.
So:
- To people promoting reuse: maybe go beyond the environmental impact and appeal to quality of life. Having bag or two in your boot all the time is a good idea.
- To people promoting single use: others have pointed out that you need to address the other environmental problems beyond energy, but also acknowledge that you're asking people to find a replacement for their everyday tote bags as well.
That episode has always stuck with me, and I've always wondered how valid their argument is.
In actuality what will happen is that all these buried landfills will break, all the bad stuff will leak out and enter the ground water. The groundwater becomes polluted, the plants start dying. And you end up with dead dirt that nothing will grow in.
The people advocating for landfills now, are not going to be around 500 years from now to see the results of their selfish thinking.
The primary issue is that we took elements naturally found in nature and used them to create manmade synthetic material, that nature has no tools to deal with. And these manmade synthetic material will eventually break down small enough to the point where quantum forces take over (nanoscale sized particles) and enter the groundwater. And plants and animals will drink in these manmade synthetic materials the size of nanometers, and the body has nothing that can breakdown or deal with these manmade synthetic materials. Putting a piece of shit into icecream and mixing it is easy. Unmixing a icecream mixed with shit to remove the shit is scientifically impossible.
For billions of years, high-density elements (lead, cadmium, mercury, rare earth elements, arsenic) were locked away in solid mineral ores, buried under hundreds of feet of rock. Surface biology only ever encountered them as faint, background trace elements.
We mined gigatons of these ores, refined them to near-100% purity, combined them with synthetic chemicals, and packed them into hyper-dense landfill cells right above or near freshwater aquifers.
Of course, this requires you to have less trash , which is very easy if you simply take a few seconds to go outside and throw your food out after lunch/dinner. Everything else is just dry scraps usually. There’s always the fridge :)
All in all, there is no concept of “garbage”, “garbage bin” , or any kind of “garbage accumulation” in my apartments.
Oh, you can also just freaking flush small things down the toilet. Seriously, it’s like a little mini garbage. Only advise this for people with great water pressure (lucky you!).
If I had a backyard, I’d be burning and burying garbage too, man.
Last but not least, never ever buy expensive garbage bags. It’s literally going in the garbage, man.
I respect the approach and find it fascinating even though I think it’s crazy aha. I don’t think this would be very compatible at all with a lot of people’s cooking habits or hobbies, etc. Or if your apartment complex has an inconvenient garbage disposal location.
And there’s a lot of garbage I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting in the freezer.
How do you handle bathroom trash? I’m thinking feminine hygiene products specifically. Surely you don’t recommend flushing those right?
People with this attitude are why the drains in my apartment keep backing up and my landlord sends emails threatening to evict whoever's flushing things they shouldn't.
I think there's a thing about food shopping here. Americans just don't go shopping as frequently, so you're better off with paper bags in the back of your car.
I am a Brit. I have a Lidl cotton bag that I've probably used sixty times already. It augments and will ultimately replace two reusable foldable/pocketable bags from Marks & Spencer that I have used for all of my shopping for at least thirteen years, perhaps more like sixteen.
I shop on foot, about once every four or five days. I wil have used the two M&S bags on more than a thousand journeys. One of them is finally wearing thin. The other goes in my pocket more or less whenever I leave the house. They were themselves made from recycled material.
I use two the majority of the time so I am confident I've avoided using at least 1800 plastic bags.
(Weird timing, but I did end up needing one last night, annoyingly, because I had to shop in an emergency, but it is the first time in five years or so and it already has a reuse purpose)
Reusable shopping bags are easy. A British shopper might even get to 173 uses in a single year.
Also: > In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic.
They make it seem like this is a bad thing but surely the average cotton bag gets used more than 173 times. I've probably used some of my oldest reusable bags like ~1k times.
So what? That's like a year of grocery shopping maybe. I easily use a tote bag for way longer than that and I'm not trying that hard to live an environment friendly life.
I use maybe one PET water bottle each month when i go for outdoor activities. PET bottle i would buy anyway even if i had reusable one, because i've got stuck somewhere without running water or because i craved bottled icetea or orange juice. After carefully rinsing it. I keep using it for month or so and then dispose it. I only use it for clean tap water. No sugar or anything that might promote unnecessary microbial growth. Non-abrasive rinsing. Store with lid off when not in use.
These are usualy made locally in soda bottling companies, so the shipping is cheaper and more ecological than shipping reusable bottles from one central reusable bottle factory (likely abroad). This makes me feel zero guilt when i finaly decide it's used enough to be disposed.
Quite often these are reasonably sturdy to be used for months if you keep them in backpack and don't throw them around too much. And the reusable bottles get damaged over time as well if you don't treat them right.
Reusable bottle people say something about how refilling that water bottle make it leak BPA or whatever chemicals. That's just insane. I've seen huge grocery market chains storing pallets of those in direct sunlight for months, yet somehow magically that's not leaking enough to violate any regulatory limits. But me puting pure tap water into the bottle automaticaly makes it extremely nasty hormonal disruptor according to some people.
On the other hand, i would like to see some sensible regulation on amount of packaging materials vs amount of product these are holding. Shrinkflation and cost cutting caused some products to be ridiculously small compared to amount of packaging they need. (especialy when you realize the relationship between volume of product and surface area covered by packaging is geometricaly increasing the packaging to product ratio when shrinking down). Sometimes it kinda makes sense (pills/medications), sometimes it's kinda stupid (100ml water bottles - and yes, i am aware of airplanes and conference rooms).
Yeah, let's stop doing the fairly well established recycling programs that have knock on benefits like reducing pollution, and instead start scaling an entirely unproven and expensive mitigation program.
These are some prominent Effect Altruism guys so I know "cause prioritization" is their whole thing. But I think this is just basic contrarianism, because you cant fundraise off the fact that the cultural shift to recycling in the first world has been pretty successful and positive.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-...
"The real solution is to switch to systems of reuse and refill," Ramsden said. "We are at a decision point on plastic pollution. It is time for corporations to turn off the plastic tap."
"Just Bury Your Trash" is arguing "Turn the plastic tap on more please, and don't even bother TRYING to recycle it".
Carbon capture is a scam to allow fossil consumption to continue as is. The only path forward is rapid destruction of fossil fuel demand and transitioning to clean energy and electric mobility. At this time, there is no effective technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBFos_T7cT0
Global heating will hit at least 1.8C, UN warns, and there are ‘no good outcomes’ - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/02/global-h... - September 2nd, 2026
Climeworks’ capture fails to cover its own emissions - https://heimildin.is/grein/24581/ - May 15th, 2025
Carbon capture has a long history. Of failure - https://thebulletin.org/2022/09/plagued-by-failures-carbon-c... - September 1st, 2022
Like lets think about plastic bags from an object use standpoint. Given you have a collection of stuff to carry would you prefer:
A) A reasonably sturdy bag that can be styled to your preference (like with art or whatever) that you have to remember to bring with you when you need.
B) The literal minimum possible material to be considered a bag. Even money whatever you put into it will punch straight through the bottom, or you'll need to use 2-4 nested bags anyway. And it'll be uncomfortable to hold the whole time.
I think from an object use perspective a reusable bag is more pleasant to use.
But embodied energy calculations are convenient because you can get numbers to compare. But it ignores externalities.
Like if you actually considered the embodied energy of the median tote bag vs the median plastic bag from the point that it was extracted from the ground to the point that it returns to dust, I think the story would look really different. I'll bet a sizable percentage of plastic bags don't even make it through their first use. Meanwhile I've got tote bags that I think are fully 15 years old. Plus if you consider the remediation future generations will need to do for plastic bags. meanwhile I can actually bury a cotton tote bag in the dirt to decompose and it doesn't need infrastructure to prevent poisoning the water supply.
Did the authors consider the embodied energy of the landfill itself? Shipping? Trash collection? Ongoing monitoring? The embodied energy of the future carbon capture system?
It's just so convenient to look only at the materials, equate that to kg of co2, and use that for whatever narrative makes you feel good.
My point was not actually about plastic vs reusable. My point was, why is embodied energy always used in contrarian climate arguments. Why not talk about ergonomics, or the "bike waterproof-ness standard"?
I think embodied energy is being used in this article to push the author's specific views, which to fund atmospheric carbon extraction.
Not over burying the waste, as mentioned in the article. And, it has the added externality of using more energy... leading to more pollution.
https://www.chalmermagne.com/about
I don't see the link with Chalmers. I know Wiblin is.