I think there are much more important issues like space: Improperly constructed and maintained landfills (i.e. most of them) leak pollutants into the ground (water) and offgas significant quantities of methane. (No sources handy right now...)

This is currently an issue in Russia. Big cities like Moscow produce a lot of waste and the cheapest way to utilise it was to dump to a landfill in a countryside. Now people living nearby are protesting because the gases from the landfill are carried by the wind to their town several kilemeters away.

This has always been my point of confusion. The ground's gotta be made of something. Rocks don't decompose. Why is it an issue if the ground's made of something that's not rock and doesn't decompose?

If it's leaking toxic breakdown byproducts out into the water table or something then that's an issue, sure, but "things going to landfill" seems to be treated as axiomatically bad by most people.

Source?

Landfills take up a lot of space. I saw a documentary about it (forgot the name of it). Humans waste so much and the trash keeps piling up. You can only dig so much.

Landfills are three dimensional and the Earth is astonishingly large. On millennia timescales, we will never run out of places to put them.

At a depth of 400 feet, the entire US annual trash output is approximately 1,000 acre [1].

There are 37 billion acres on earth. And indeed, much of that is not very habitable land.

And importantly, landfill space is not permanently lost. There are many beautiful parks around the world built atop landfills.

[1] https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-scienc...

The waste in the landfill produces toxic gases. Also it can burn and produce even more toxic gases. Even if the landfill is several kilometers away from homes, it is still dangerous.

Also, the waste can pollute underground waters, and if there are many rivers in the region, the water will be contaminated in a large area around.

Yeah. Some toxic/flammable gasses can be produced from landfills. But that toxic gas is not produced by plastic. So reducing the amount of plastic in the landfill isn't going to reduce the amount of toxic stuff. Similarly, the plastic in a landfill is not going to end up in underground water, or in rivers. So what's your point?

So the problem isn't that it takes space then.

This is pretty much what the environmentalists were preaching when I was growing up. Not sure why to be honest. In retrospect it certainly seems like "but the landfills!" is the lesser of all evils.

Probably a combination of NIMBYism and poor land-use planning. Back when many of these landfills were created, they were on the outskirts of urban areas, where "outskirts" = 15-20 miles away. After the wave of suburbanization in the 1950s-80s, suddenly those outskirts are right next to someone's home. Now it's a crisis.

Most people's conception of what land is available is limited to their local metropolitan area, and they have no idea just how abundant land is in the hinterlands. You could probably bury all the nation's garbage in the craters left inside the Nevada Proving Grounds, which is a radioactive wasteland anyway. And shipping contains of garbage 500 miles from LA, Vegas, and SF to Northern Nevada looks a lot more appealing when you've gotten used to shipping it 10,000 miles to China.

Shipping over water is cheaper than shipping over land.

Only if you don’t price in environmental impact. Trains are much more efficient than ships in this regard and can be powered purely by green energy.

> Trains are much more efficient than ships in this regard

Is that really true? At least for CO2 emissions, other sources seem to imply the opposite, with ships being much more efficient than trains: https://truecostblog.com/2009/11/23/is-local-really-greener-...

I'm referring to an electric train powered by green energy—an ideal, not a current reality. As far as I am aware, shipping lanes are just as difficult to green as planes are, maybe even more so.

>an ideal, not a current reality.

Dutch trains run on sustainable power.

https://www.ns.nl/en/about-ns/sustainability/energy/sustaina...

We know how to make very large nuclear powered ships. You could fit an astonishing amount of waste on something the size of the Nimitz, especially if it didn't need to make task group speeds.

Hmm, fair point.

If you live next to a harbor, sure. Lots of places in North America are not near the coast.

True, but probably not 20x true.

It's because of the Mobro 4000. Corrupt mafia fuckery that got mistaken for a environmental crisis.

I want to believe that, but then we have this 65 meter trash pile in Delhi.

https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/india-trash-mo...

That's not a space issue. That's an improper handling issue.

This has way more to do with India than what the person said.

The point remains true, that’s just a shitty place for a landfill. The issue isn’t space, it’s our use of resources.