Yeah, it's not invented in America, so it obviously doesn't exist.
Listen, there are countries with almost no landfills because everything is incinerated. Heck, there are even US states without landfills because everything is incinerated! This is not a "tall order", trash incineration is a solved problem, modern trash incineration plants are very efficient at reclaiming energy into either heat or electricity.
While these plants may be efficient at reclaiming energy, there are other factors to consider.
From the article: “And while many incineration facilities bill themselves as “waste to energy” plants, studies have found that they release more harmful chemicals, such as mercury and lead, into the air per unit of energy than do coal plants”
If Americans "are terrible at recycling" as the article says, then the incinerators will be burning the wrong stuff.
The thing with recycling is there are mountains of externalities to whether it makes sense or not way beyond just the question of if recycling itself is profitable, the most profound of which just being the carrying cost of consuming so much space with landfills, especially in areas of higher population density - you have more trash per unit area but have to carry that trash farther to get it away from the density. In those environments local recycling centers can be much more economically viable.
I live in Kansas, we get a lot of wind. I pick up an enormous amount of my neighbor's "recyclables" that have clearly spent a long time blowing around before they land in my yard. We need to mandate better receptacles.
But then you have to process the ash: https://www.thisiseco.co.uk/news_and_blog/what-happens-to-wa...
(2) is roughly the Green Dot or WEEE approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)
I do have a problem labeling it as green energy, and it should be the option of last resort after all other recycling options have been exhausted.
I mean, if it's really not having an impact on e.g. rainforests etc, and adds the environmental toll of all the petroleum used to ship it all back overseas and the recycling process, might it even be a net loss for the environment?
The gases produce need to be captured and burned, though. All that methane. Interestingly, they also need to be decontaminated of traces of silicon-containing compounds, which can muck up turbines in which they're burned.
[1] most economical, accounting for externalities
The obvious (but not workable) answer is to just charge the actual cost of disposing material in landfills. But this doesn't work because it encourages illegal dumping and littering.
So, I can see two solutions:
(1) Some process that converts bulk garbage into something that takes up less space. Incineration and pyrolysis are like this. Maybe you get some useful energy or gases out of it, but the main point is to reduce the cost of disposal. But this would have to be cheap and clean, a tall order.
(2) A tax on all manufactured goods, based on their disposal footprint, that subsidizes the landfills. Since this tax is already paid it can't be avoided by illegal dumping.