This is a source of anxiety for me lately. We use plastic everywhere and yet seem to not know what to do with it. Plastic is cheap they say, but would plastic be so cheap if we had to factor in the price of recycling it or at least handling its after life? Would it be realistic to ask to think about what to do with wastes of the products sold?
The cost of landfill is really low, so it wouldn’t make any difference if it were added to the cost of plastic.
The world has a lot of important environmental problems, like climate change. Landfill space is not an important environmental problem. You should spend your worrying energy on something else.
> The cost of landfill is really low, so it wouldn’t make any difference if it were added to the cost of plastic.
The cost isn’t just disposal, it’s also production. Plastic production (‘ethylene cracking’ specifically) is really environmentally gnarly. Communities across the US and internationally will be way better off once we move away from disposable consumer plastics.
Oil supply is effectively infinite. By that I mean there is so much available that we will have destroyed the planet before we remove it all. We extract as much as there is a demand for. If you lower the demand then you lower the amount being extracted
Shell’s new US-based plant [1] is expected to pump half a million cars worth of CO2 exhaust into the air a year. I haven’t seen any data suggesting that plastics production reduces the net amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I'm not sure are you serious about not seeing landfill connection with environmental problems or just being sarcastic.
If landfills are not such a problem, why "developed" countries (I won't name them but we know who they are) are exporting junk to China, India and Africa? Why simply not set landfills near popular cities so we can all enjoy the beauty of "low environmental issue" problems ;)
These days there is more trust in corrupted media than plain logic.
The reason governments waste time on recycling, or fail to authorize landfills, or orchestrate the export of trash to other countries is because environmentalists exist and are very active. They're especially powerful in rich countries – in fact, environmentalism seems to be a function of affluence. Affluence looks like a necessary but not sufficient condition, loosely speaking.
Your information is incorrect. No countries are exporting junk, rather some countries buy recycling in order to profitably use it.
And those developed countries were willing to sell it.
And yes those developed countries do in fact have landfills and they use them. there are no countries that export pure trash to be landfilled in a third world country.
Landfills are tiny relative to usable land and are eventually just capped and turned into parks.
Most of the popular fear about running out of landfill space can be traced back to a misused statistic about small rural landfills being decommissioned. RCRA Subtitle D regs basically have driven the shutdown of old town dumps. Modern landfills are much more efficient, with better safety controls for leaching and gas capture, better compression and sorting, and even processes that speed decomposition. The headlines will scream that the number of available landfills are dropping rapidly and neglect to mention that total capacity is actually up and total disposed volume has been trending down since 2000, even despite population increases.
Highly recommend touring a landfill and learning about waste management at scale.
There are really interesting engineering dilemmas that are always a step more nuanced than "we must use x solution or fill the world with trash."
Efficient leachate control is an interesting area, but there are various families of techniques to do it and methods for monitoring effectiveness that have emerged from the last several decades of focused study.
Current facilities are way better equipped than the old solution of uncontrolled municipal dumps.
Still, leachate control is nothing but a cost center to the people running a landfill. It's likely that plenty of landfills are not as compliant as they report, through intention or ignorance; and when the landfill operator goes bankrupt nobody takes over the maintenance. In a sense, leachate control is the low-tar cigarette of waste disposal
> leachate control is nothing but a cost center to the people running a landfill
A lot of these fixes are more expensive to fake to code than to just implement, and isolating sources of groundwater pollution can take a few years, but not decades. Also a lot of these people live there and know the risks to their kids' safety.
The environmental engineers who consult on these projects didn't generally go into the field to poison people.
If anything, experience from the past gave the people running these things suggestions where they can most likely cut costs without the whole thing blowing up into their faces before they retire. Same with monitoring. It's costly, nothing happened the last couple years, let's just do it less thoroughly.
Look at nuclear power. Might be the greatest and cleanest solution in theory. In practice, look at the revelations after Fukushima. Mismanagement, dramatically negligent maintenance, corruption. Would proper management have prevented the incident? Probably not, but it wouldn't have been nearly as bad. Without the tsunami, this might have continued for years to come and who knows how and when shit would've hit the fan in this alternate reality. Then the shitshow that is storing nuclear waste here in Germany. Again instead of listening to scientists and engineers in the end they dumped the metal containers inside an old salt mine. Big surprise, salt water lead to rapid corrosion and now they have to get that shit out again, but thankfully the tax payer cover that bullshit. Another example? 737 MAX. Yet again a story of a company that kept cutting costs over years and years until it blew up in their faces. It ticked pretty much all the boxes over the year. Cutting corners, saving costs, budget restrictions, ignoring concerns by engineers in charge, you name it.
It's always the same pattern. If Apple doesn't innovate, cheaps out on components, scraps QA, their products might eventually suck so much that nobody will buy them anymore and they'll just disappear, but who cares. Nuclear isn't bad. Aviation isn't bad. Landfills aren't. But these are these kinds of industries where negligence can have catastrophic results. And especially something that is as long term as a landfill is predestined for this kind of failure.
Landfills replacement a tiny volume and can be mined long term. It’s mostly organic matter that’s going to turn into coal and oil eventually but there plenty of more useful elements like copper in the mix.
I'm continually amazed at how popular the concept of mining landfills for resources is in this forum, while at the same time recycling is regularly dismissed as wishful thinking.
Perhaps it just needs rebranded as pre-emptive landfill mining?
Many forms of post consumer recycling are not worth it today with both streams often ending in the same landfills. That’s the only objection I have to recycling.
But, in a thousand or even a million years the atoms will still be around. Basically we may find this stuff useless, but that does not mean it’s permanently devoid of value. If nothing else archeology often involves going through trash heaps from ages past.
Until someone creates a machine that can pulverise anything into a fine powder and progressively sort each granule into their constituent metal, plastic, silica and organic type.
That doesn’t make chemical sense. There is a huge energetic cost to smelting ore to remove the oxides, vs. landfill material that is exactly what you need but just needs to be sorted and cleaned.
The concentrations of valuable materials in the landfill are minuscule. It doesn't make energy sense to sort it even though the fractions are relatively ready to use.
Actually, no. You might say this about metals, for example, but nature does not produce the sort of high-energy low-information hydrocarbon chains that comprise nearly all plastics. Inserting massive quantities of manmade endocrine disruptors into the earth is massively disruptive.
I'd guess many environmental issues are connected. Rethinking how we produce and consume should lead to solutions that both reduce waste and save energy. Having to deal with the trash ourselves for a bit might put some incentive to consider waste while designing products and supply chains.
A meta study of papers doing lifecycle cost analysis of the options shows that on several metrics, including climate change reduction, landfill is worse than both incineration and recycling for a broad range of materials. This is why almost every functional government in the world legislates accordingly.
This is partly due to the energy cost of new vs recycled so somewhat ironically landfill becomes a slightly better option as the grid becomes more renewable, though unlikely to pull ahead of recycling, since it also takes energy that would be getting cleaner.
i very, very much doubt that said study existed at the time these decisions were made.
also the energy cost is a wash (or loss) for almost all but aluminum. glass would be fine but we are awash in glass, so AIUI cardboard and aluminum are the only consumer items worth recycling when consider energy and other input costs. i’ve no idea on total climate impact (eg greenhouse gas production) though and i don’t doubt you. i only doubt your assertion that governments made these decisions with that in mind.
A summary from the latter talking specifically about plastic (though the document covers other materials):
The results confirm that mechanical recycling is the best waste management option in respect of the climate change potential, depletion of natural resources and energy demand impacts. The analysis highlights again that these benefits of recycling are mainly achieved by avoiding production of virgin plastics.
The environmental benefits are maximised by collection of good quality material (to limit the rejected fraction)
and by replacement of virgin plastics on a high ratio (1 to 1).
Incineration with energy recovery performs poorly with respect to climate change impact
Landfill is confirmed as having the worst environmental impacts in the majority of cases.
As the UK moves to a lower-carbon energy mix, recycling will become increasingly favoured.
The first link is a "meta-analysis" where they only found three studies on point with wildly different methods that disagreed in their conclusions.
One of the studies said the costs of sorting made the benefits of plastic recycling negligible to iffy, confirming parent's claim that aluminum drives recycling value and plastics are a wash.
They shouldn't be allowed to call it a meta-analysis if they just read three studies and picked the conclusions they liked best.
I think you've misread that, they only found three recent economic analysis of recycling that dealt purely with plastic. (Quite possibly because it makes no sense to set up a recycling system for just one output, since the additional cost once you've started is minimal)
They also found 20 papers that dealt with the climate change emissions and total energy use and ranked them on those factors as well.
The comment I replied to specifically said that we shouldn't worry about landfill space as we have more important issues like climate change, so that's 95% of studies found suggesting that opinion isn't based on facts and that landfill would be a worse option than recycling plastic for greenhouse gas emissions, which we've agreed is a serious problem. (And landfill broadly tied with burning it for energy on greenhouse gas emissions with different assumptions giving different answers).
To your point about total energy use, landfill comes out worst consistently and recycling best.
You could make the leap and assume the process that uses the least energy and releases the least greenhouse gases is also the least expensive economically (if you account for externalities) but that's a bonus on top of providing useful information that could change opinions related to greenhouse gas emissions.
You seem to doubt that governments made decisions based on facts, yet the facts now support their decision, while your stated beliefs about energy usage are contradicted by the science.
Is it not possible that the environmental benefits of recycling plastics had actually been considered by governments that brought in legislation? Where does your belief that it was ever considered likely to be a counterproductive activity come from? Did they convince you of anything else, like solar panels not making sense or EVs being worse for the environment, or wind turbines boondoggles? All those were similarly supported by effective government support programs and repaid the investment greatly.
Important points to consider, I'm open to updating my views here.
> You seem to doubt that governments made decisions based on facts,
It's actually the reverse, I've become more skeptical because so many recycling programs are now just landfilling plastic because the costs no longer justify recycling it.
The price of oil should tell us something about the relative efficiency of recycling plastic. It would be weird if there was zero relation.
Oil prices being consistently low for a decade probably contribute to shifting efficiencies here.
I worry more generally about reuse and recycle heuristics since early environmental impact studies showed they frequently produce bad results. But that doesn't mean they always do.
Maybe you're right and those input factors haven't changed enough to affect the total cost math.
> Is it not possible that the environmental benefits of recycling plastics had actually been considered by governments that brought in legislation?
It is not. the paper you cited (thank you) was written in 2017. But more to the point, governments don’t work that way.
If in fact the reason for recycling is environmental benefit, we (USA anyway) would not be in the situation where we are putting plastics back in landfills, and we would not have been in the prior situation where we dump plastic and ewaste to other countries with no oversight whatsoever on what happens to it once it leaves our shores. the environmental impact is the same, here or there.
> Landfill space is not an important environmental problem. You should spend your worrying energy on something else.
Let me guess you're American, where free space is plenty? In most of Europe, space is constrained and about half the EU has banned ordinary landfills for that reason.
Also, landfills are an inherent danger to their surroundings in case the bottom barrier breaks and fluids seep into groundwater or that more-or-less uncontrollable fires break out.
You are massively underestimating the environmental impacts. Every form of plastic in widespread use has been found to be a significant endocrine disruptor. The rate of plastic waste has followed an exponential curve similar to emissions. Plastics are likely on the same order of magnitude as climate change and deforestation in terms of the long-term impact on species extinction (and to human health, if that is of greater concern).
Sweden just burns it cleanly. I don't have any anxiety over the single-use plastic I use, just frustration that we worry too much about what to do with it. Now the Pacific trash island is another story...
