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Re:Canada declares plastics toxic, paving the way for restri... by atom_arranger on Saturday May 22, 2021 @04:52AM (#27244797)
We could bury it in a giant pit somewhere without a lot of water running through it (prevent leeching).

The actual amount of waste there is isn’t actually that high if you were to store it in a giant cube somewhere, the problem is the logistics of that, and the fact that right now it’s everywhere.

I can’t find a source right now but I remember something like, if you were to take all the garbage produced by the world and put it in one place it would be a kilometer cubed, or something like that.

Re:Canada declares plastics toxic, paving the way for restri... by citiguy on Sunday May 23, 2021 @11:05AM (#27255457)
The NYTimes magazine [1] ran a piece in 1996 says a 35 square mile landfill, 100 yards deep, will store all US trash until the year 3000. To put that in perspective, that's about 1 tenth of 1 percent of the range land currently available for grazing. I'm sure someone could find a corner in a desert somewhere for such a need if required.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-gar...

Re:Canada declares plastics toxic, paving the way for restri... by lotsofpulp on Saturday May 22, 2021 @08:09AM (#27245731)
That does not sound right. Just based on pictures like these:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/world/asia/indias-plague-...

The US alone produces near 300 million tons per year, and a kilometer cube of water weights 1,000 million tons.

https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...

Re:Canada declares plastics toxic, paving the way for restri... by atom_arranger on Saturday May 22, 2021 @06:07PM (#27250704)
It may have been per year, I don’t recall. The waste in that photo does not seem very deep, so it’s possibly taking up a lot more area than needed.

So if we go by that stat (300 million tons per year) we need 0.3km^3 per year for the United States to store all of its waste. So let’s say we have a hundred years worth, that’s 30km^3. Could we dig a hole 30km^3 somewhere? Not really, we can’t dig that deep generally. If we made this hole (or structure, it could have walls and a net over possibly) 100km by 100km it would need to be 2.7km deep/high to store 100 years of garbage.

It would be difficult to do this, and would probably need more area to be feasible, but I would think it would be less of a mess environmentally to try to contain the problem to a few sites like this rather than having smaller poorly contained dumps all over the world.