Some years ago, Switzerland completely stopped using landfills. All garbage is incinerated. The resulting slag is then processed to reclaim nearly all metals as well as some other important elements.
Of course, the burning creates CO2. However, you don't have to mine and refine metal ores, and the incinerators also generate electricity and district heating. So the ecological balance is actually pretty good.
As a final bonus, you don't have literal square miles of landfills that occupy land and eventually will leak lovely chemicals into groundwater. The slag is far less problematic, and there is a lot less of it to deal with.
>you don't have literal square miles of landfills that occupy land
Land area is a non-issue. Google says Switzerland produces "80 to 90 million tonnes" of garbage per year. Assuming that garbage has the same density of water, and a landfill is 10 meters deep, a 1 sq mi landfill will last 287 years. Moreover, Wikipedia says Switzerland has 15,940 square miles of land, so that will only take up 0.006% of the country's land area.
>eventually will leak lovely chemicals into groundwater
this is a non-issue in modern landfills because they're designed with various mechanisms to prevent that from happening (eg. lining).
Is your math right? 90 million tons of water/10 m gets me 1.7 km2, so a 1 sq mi landfill would last around ... 1 year, not 287.
That said, of the 90 million of waste, 60-70 million is construction waste, and just 6 million tons is municipal waste. On the other hand, I'm not sure you can just assume that waste has the same density as water; from a cursory glance it seems to about 1/3.
> Is your math right? 90 million tons of water/10 m gets me 1.7 km2, so a 1 sq mi landfill would last around ... 1 year, not 287.
You're right, looks like I forgot to convert liters to tons.
>On the other hand, I'm not sure you can just assume that waste has the same density as water; from a cursory glance it seems to about 1/3.
is this before or after compaction? Intuitively speaking, most things I throw out would sink in water. A garbage bin/trash bag might float because it has a bunch of air, but presumably that will all get pushed out when buried 10 meters deep.
There is no evidence that those mechanisms will last longer than the pollution from the landfill. Nor should we base plans on "nothing bad will definitely happen"
>Assuming that garbage has the same density of water
It is probably much less dense.
>Moreover, Wikipedia says Switzerland has 15,940 square miles of land, so that will only take up 0.006% of the country's land area.
I do not think many landfills are located in mountains and Switzerland is fairly mountainous. The available livable and arable land is a fraction of its total land area.
The technology of landfills has massively improved over the years. It's not the old pile of garbage covered in birds forever; they turn them into parks and whatnot. It's probably worth looking up, because there's some cool scientific advancements behind it.
I'm pulling this next sentence completely out of my ass, but I also imagine it would be convenient, once we develop bacteria to break this stuff down in an environmentally friendly way, to just pour it over these contained blocks of waste.
I'm super excited for all the plastic in the world and all the devices that we use everyday to rot because we developed a bacteria that eats it and now your iPhone internals have an infection and your phone just disintegrates and the steering wheel falls off your car
I unironically am. Humans are not responsible enough to control a cheap material that doesn't biodegrade; it's everywhere now, including our own blood stream, because we took a material of near-infinite durability and used it for disposable packaging. Madness. We have lost the right to it.
Lots of organisms eat wood and cotton. How often does your furniture and clothing just randomly disintegrate? You really cannot imagine a middle ground between these products existing for millions of years vs. your steering wheel falling apart while you're driving?
Except that bacterium was introduced as a weapon specifically to destroy that society. Weren't they trying to take control of the ring once society collapsed?
>The Puppeteers mistook the City Builders to be the Ringworld's engineers and become suddenly afraid to encounter so powerful a species. The Puppeteers examined the Ringworld's superconductor material and created a technophytic bacterium to seed the Ringworld and destroy the superconductor. The strategy was to follow the probes with trading ships and come to the profitable rescue of the City Builders. However, the Puppeteers soon realized that the City Builders could not possibly have created the Ringworld, and discovered several Pak artifacts. The Puppeteers feared the Pak above nearly all other threats.
>The Conservatives took control of the government and the Ringworld project was abandoned.
Puppeteers don't colonize. They trade, and destroy threats, but the Conservative majority doesn't actually want to own or operate the Ringworld. (Remember, they're flying through space on a rosette of five planets... with over a trillion puppeteers crowded onto just one of them, and the other four covered with automated farms. Elbow room isn't something a herd animal values.)
Would you do me a kindness and let me know later if sarcasm gets through people who can’t care about the environment a bit more than their own consumption? I’ve tried reason but it never works.
If you think about it, there are strong evolutionary incentives for people to take from someone/something else rather than reduce their own consumption voluntarily. Hell, it’s what all ecosystems are built on!
Yeah, people have also gotten mealworms to eat Styrofoam. My concern is more that the plastics industry successfully pushed plastic recycling heavily with marketing so that growth of their products would continue, even as said recycling was just dumping the material in developing countries where it mostly ended up burned or in the ocean. There can be a huge, huge disconnect between technically possible and what happens in the real world.
I was once told by a chemist that bacteria breaking down plastic is not an unthinkable thing. He said it's chemically quite similar to something existing (fat?), so once bacteria stop ignoring plastic due to details in their chemical fingerprint, they can break it down. They would be able to do so already if not for said details.
I'm mostly fantasizing about it because I've read about plastic-eating bacteria and radiation-powered bacteria, so it seems possible to do, like, anything. But yeah I fully admit it's probably mythical to some degree.
We need to reduce carbon emissions to zero in couple decades. Burning trash isn't an issue now, but we need to keep in mind that isn't really "green" when deciding to build more plants.
The problem with burning trash is that it turns all of the carbon into CO2. Trash in landfill does produce methane which is worse greenhouse gas, but it sounds like landfill are starting to capture or burn methane. The best option is likely to separate biologic waste and compost it. That produces some CO2 but puts the remaining carbon back where can be used. Plastic doesn't degrade, paper can be recycled, which means most of the carbon is sequestered or reused.
i thought this was an order of magnitude problem, like when people react the same way to an epidemic that could kill a hundred thousand people or a hundred million, but it turns out to be a sensible thing to be concerned about
you will never reduce carbon dioxide emissions to zero per person; people emit carbon dioxide just by breathing. but the quantity determines whether or not it matters
the amount produced by burning garbage is a few times bigger than breathing
https://dercuano.github.io/notes/underground-arcology.html#a... has some of my notes on garbage; the high bit is that, in new york, residential and commercial waste is about a tonne per person per year, mostly things like paper and plastic which burn to carbon dioxide and water. so you might emit two tonnes of the dioxide per person per year by burning their trash
now, probably people in new york throw away more garbage and burn more fossil fuels than average, so these numbers are maybe not as close as they appear; but the fossil fuels number doesn't make the potential garbage burnination number totally insignificant like i thought it would
>you will never reduce carbon dioxide emissions to zero per person; people emit carbon dioxide just by breathing. but the quantity determines whether or not it matters
This is a classic misrepresentation of the problem. Policy makers don't care about how much CO2 you emit as long as it stays within the bio capacity of the planet. I.e. is there a net accumulation of CO2 and yes, yes there is. The CO2 you breathe had to be captured by the plants in the first place and therefore doesn't represent a net accumulation. The CO2 emissions involved in the agricultural processes of the food you eat, however do represent a net accumulation since the fuels were dug out of the ground.
i think that my comment already covers this, except that the policy makers are not people whose judgment is of interest; the only way that they're relevant to this discussion is that they caused the problem in the first place
in particular, i said that your emissions from breathing are
> hopefully sourced from the air via plants. so, too, is most of the combustible garbage
the story is a little more complicated, though, because point-source carbon capture is feasible for trash incinerators (and, say, container ships) but not for people breathing, so trash incinerators could conceivably provide indirect atmospheric carbon capture by way of the trees and food that ended up in the garbage. i didn't want to get into these complexities, which is why i didn't go into more detail in my original comment
more importantly, though, i don't appreciate being called a fucking liar (even if euphemistically) because i disagree with you about something. people like you are why i always regret engaging on this site. please begin adhering to minimal norms of civility before you fucking comment again
> The best option is likely to separate biologic waste and compost it. That produces some CO2 but puts the remaining carbon back where can be used. Plastic doesn't degrade, paper can be recycled, which means most of the carbon is sequestered or reused.
There are also technologies that turn biologic waste and plastics back into a high-quality oil that has a variety of uses. On balance I don't know if this is better than direct burning for energy production, but for more robust plastic recycling it might be.
> The Mobro 4000 was a barge owned by MOBRO Marine, Inc. made infamous in 1987 for hauling the same load of trash along the east coast of North America from New York City to Belize and back until a way was found to dispose of the garbage. ...
> In 1987, the City of New York found that it had reached its landfill capacity. The city agreed to ship its garbage to Morehead City, North Carolina, where there were plans to convert it into methane.
Until you go to your local landfill and see the massive fuming hellscape spanning thousands of acres with mountains of garbage just laying there and mentally extrapolate how it will look even 10 more years from now.
The landfill here in town has a sledding hill, swimming pool, jungle gym, and a skate park. It was in the hinterlands of the town, but the town grew fast.
How come the slag is far less problematic? You didn’t describe where it goes.
I also don’t see the “ecological balance” here. That usually refers to relationships among organisms in an ecosystem where one’s waste is another’s sustenance, but where does the generated CO2 go? Or did you mean a trade-off of pollution?
The slag is less problematic, because chemicals are destroyed by the burning process. You're basically left with ceramics, melted glass, bits of metal and a bunch of oxides. After the useful elements (mainly metals) have been removed, the remaining slag is buried.
By ecological balance I was mostly referring to the emission of CO2. While that is an inevitable part of incineration, it is largely compensated by reclaiming the metals, plus using the incinerators to generate electricity and district heating.
As I recall, incinerators have a poor reputation in the US because unfiltered incinerators were used back in the 1940s and 1950s, causing serious pollution problems. Modern incinerators filter the flue gases and the results are clean enough that the incinerators are often inside cities.
The OP did say that the slag was processed to remove everything that can be reused. I would imagine whatever is left over heads to a landfill, but at that point it is at least mostly bath water.
It depends on the temperature they burn at. You need pretty high heats to combust dioxins, for example, and from some very light skimming of the USA's standards I think you also need various filters and scrubbers for heavy metals (especially mercury which will boil away at these temperatures).
This stuff can be done, but it's expensive. I also don't know how close to 100% it gets even if everything is done properly. And of course to fully remediate this all of the equipment has to be operating properly.
There's also a company called Selfrag (selective fragmentation) which uses electrical current to break the conglomerate slag along mineral fault lines to be able to more easily extract the metals..
Because it’s a lot more complicated and expensive than mining native minerals right now, because you have to deal
With all the other random things mixed in.
There's probably millions of tons of unused copper wire formerly used for telephone land lines nailed to poles unused. I wonder when we're going to start taking that down instead of despoiling natural wonders like the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska
I'd love to see 'mining' defined more broadly here. Sure metals are a great target but every useful and valuable material known to man exists in landfills. A "full cycle" or "total recovery" mindset would be far more exciting. Treat everything as potentially valuable and you get better economics. I'd love to join a company who had this as their mission. Sure, start with metal recovery but continually build out new recovery processes until you can "ingest" everything and turn it into something useful.
There is or was a British inventor who build an odd contraption with 2 vibrating plates with grinded garbage flowing between them suspended in ferrofluid. Along the track the paeticles sort themselves by density. Innitially a silly idea as ferrofluid is expensive but he wanted to see how well it worked and possibly try better fluids. It turned out to produce much more ferrofluid than was consumed. The story ends with: no one was interested enough to spend money on it.
"Trash economy. The abundance of trash. What are we gonna do with it? Are we gonna put it on an island? Are we gonna make it somebody else’s problem? Or are we going to take the initiative, and take this problem by the horns? Trash economy. You use cubes of trash as money. Everybody becomes rich, it’s a gold rush."
I've heard that the biggest barrier to reuse is the expense of purifying the inputs of the various recycling processes. A few stray baked beans can gum up the works. If so the economics would be greatly changed by a robot running AI software that can just sort and wash trash the way we're supposed to at home.
How cost effective is washing trash at home, to using packaging that is either biodegradable, or inert (paper, and glass for example, as it has been done for decades before plastics got widespread)?
Compared to this I keep hearing the bullshit that reusing glass is not environmentally friendly and a PET flask has lower carbon footprint, etc. I say bullshit. Also we should transport and sell less water (either with added sugar and CO2 or without), we have those pipes in the ground/walls at most places in the developed world, which supply us clean drinking water. We should rather focus on providing clean tapwater to everybody where it is not available, instead of selling water for 100x price in small single use containers.
I've never before heard anyone ever suggest that we're "supposed to" be sorting and washing our trash at home. What an unbelievably wasteful and pointless notion.
Japanese are taught to wash out containers before recycling. It's even on TV.
They also have the most over-packaged goods I have ever seen, individually wrapped sweets, cakes etc wrapped in a plastic box and given to you in a plastic bag (3 layers!) not being unusual. (There is now finally a plastic bag charge introduced last year.)
Here's an online tool to help people identify the various kinds of recyclables and direct them correctly. It isn't easy and I doubt few Seattle residents know all of these.
How many hours have we (as a species) wasted sorting and meticulously managing our waste when the vast majority of it never gets recycled anyway? I'm asking the question as someone who cares deeply about the environment. I just think recycling is a fake solution invented by the plastic industry to alleviate the consumer guilt that comes with purchasing single-use plastics. If you don't like a bunch of waste in your landfills, buy fewer single-use products. The vast majority of what goes into the bin never gets recycled anyway.
After moving to Switzerland I remember receiving a pamphlet with something like 15 different types of recycling I was supposed to do. There were special trash detectives that could fine people and imprison those who couldn’t pay. I lived above a recycling depot and watched locals diligently separate their trash by type of metal, color of glass, and like 10 other factors. Then once or twice a week I watched the pickup guy come by with a truck and dump the bins into one big, mixed pile in the back of his tractor-trailer.
The trash detectives are iirc looking for people who throw out trash without using the taxed bags, not for people who aren't sorting recycling correctly. I've heard of people being fined for not using the proper bags but never for just tossing things in the regular trash.
If you're in the US, read your municipal recycling tips and newer product packaging some time[1].
You'll often see "rinse and replace cap" (some plastic bottles, some say toss the cap) or "rinse and insert lid" (metal cans).
I do feel like it's probably inefficient. I'm told not to rinse dishes because my dishwasher is better (which mine definitely is) but... I'm supposed to hand rinse garbage before recycling it?
I somehow knew everyone was going to assume I was talking about recycling. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about TRASH. GP mentioned TRASH. We're talking about mining, or sorting, LANDFILLS. Why is everyone talking about recycling in their replies?
One of the protagonists of Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Mars’ trilogy (starting in ‘Blue Mars’ onwards IIRC) is a billionaire who made his billions by starting ‘dumpmines’, a landfill mining company.
I've wondered why they haven't implemented a compromise between recycling and tossing, which would just be segregating certain materials for later sale or recycling. If they put all the plastic bottles in one section of landfill, all the glass, etc it would be a bet toward there someday being a change in technology, materials science, or market prices that might make it worth mining. It would also be cheaper because the same trucks could pick it up (some cities have this, put your recyclables in a blue bag and throw them in the regular trash). One of the asinine things about recycling (to me) is that they have another has guzzling truck. There should be better accounting done on recycling so we can eliminate feel-good practices and only do things that actually help the environment. Sorting trash (at the landfill) would be a great step forward for this.
Seattle has a sorting facility for recycling in SODO, you can see it from I5 and 99 if you know where to look. It’s around half the size of the stadium. And that’s just recycling.
I'm not talking about recycling though. I'm talking about tossing the same category of waste into the same pile, so that at a future date it may be economical to retrieve and recycle. Haven't you seen the expose's (sorry I dont know how to type the accent char) about how the "recycled" plastic is shipped to china and burnt in a bonfire? But someday if there's a million tons of plastic soda bottles, someone might find it economical to make jet fuel out of them, whereas they wouldn't if they were mixed in with metal and organic waste.
You should visit the average landfill to get a firsthand impression of the sheer volume of trash that arrives every day. Sorting at that point would require a huge investment in infrastructure and technology on-site. Individuals sorting their own trash at the other end of the stream is quite easy and costs only a few minutes of their time.
It's like diverting the flow of a tributary stream vs. diverting the Mississippi River.
I've been to landfills before, thank you. It's certainly possible with technology or manpower to separate the garbage. Sorting would require a "huge investment" ? well good thing WM is a XXX-billion dollar corporation, right? I mean, otherwise that might hurt their bottom line. Think of the corporations, amirite?
The real concern is how much energy that would require, but luckily many landfills can capture the methane emitted by previous disposal and what better way to use it than power on-side sorting facilities.
My main point is that WM (and any other trash haulers, I know someone will say "WM isn't the only company - as if that adds any value to the conversation) is stagnating instead of innovating. Thinking ahead that within a decade or two, we might have a bacteria that eats plastic (and maybe even turns it into fuel!) or that burning more diesel (to pick up recyclables) might not be such a good idea. In other industries, they have real-time cameras that can sort tiny shards of broken glass (or grains of wheat!) to keep out contaminants. Theres no reason to think WM can't innovate similarly, they just have no pressure/incentive to.
You are so casual about throwing away an irreplaceable resource.
Like many conversations about the environment and taxation, many people seem happy to talk all day about how others can afford to pay and about how others should pay.
Personally, I worry about how costly those defuse costs are overall. How often do we save uneconomic resources by wasting aggregate large amounts of resources. The tradeoffs seem to be rarely counted. Only one side of the ledger is looked at.
In context Switzerland decided that all garbage is incinerated. Perhaps we should presume that Switzerland has done this because it is the most enviromentally friendly and least wasteful measure.
Big City: "Hey WM, we appreciate the valuable service you provide us just like you appreciate the monopoly on business we grant you. Trouble is, your industry doesn't seem to innovate at the same pace as other industries. Starting next year, we are going to levy taxes and fees on your business model. You can avoid paying these fees if you invest in technology to meet the following requirements: lower miles driven by your fleet, segregate 95% of plastic bottles, glass bottles, and food cans (they still go to the landfill, just in a particular place). Don't want to change? Fine, we'll bust your monopoly and you can compete with firms that will innovate."
My knee jerk reaction is that I wouldn't trust a mining operation to clean up after itself. While I'm sure that landfills could be cleaner, whatever level of cleanliness they achieve is based on the assumption that the sites won't be disturbed.
My notion was, conventional mining often doesn't bother to clean up after itself (eg., orphan wells), whereas landfill mining will likely be held to a higher standard.
Reading through the several answers, it seems like the TL;DR is
1. Maybe there is toxic material IDK who wants to touch that instead of some rock
2. The industry actors who would do it only regard landfills as shiny metal reserves, and don't want/can't get the other materials one might extract from it, raising cost floor
Some day once we strip the entire planet of its accessible natural resources and turn it into trash the landfills will be the only place left to scrounge for rare materials.
The rule of thumb used to be you could save about a kilowatt hour of electricity making a soda can from recycled aluminum versus mining and refining. I don’t know where things sit today
Aluminum was ridiculously expensive before the electrolysis method and municipal electricity.
I took a truckload of scrap steel and aluminum to the scrap yard and got a pretty good chunk of money for it. Used metals are definitely worth something. All old cars are cushed and paid for by the ton. You can even take old wire and piping to the scrap yards for money. That's why abandoned houses will get ripped apart for copper pipes and wiring.
Sometimes, yes. It depends on many factors, but generally speaking if it is profitable to recycle, it would be unlikely to end up in a landfill in the first place.
Of course, the burning creates CO2. However, you don't have to mine and refine metal ores, and the incinerators also generate electricity and district heating. So the ecological balance is actually pretty good.
As a final bonus, you don't have literal square miles of landfills that occupy land and eventually will leak lovely chemicals into groundwater. The slag is far less problematic, and there is a lot less of it to deal with.