“Do animals prefer plastic or no plastic” is a false choice. The real choice is “do animals prefer plastic or rapid global warming”.

Omg, travel the USA more. So. Much. Land.

Much of Nevada is a lifeless desert. There is a reason it was chosen for nuclear bomb testing.

It's not lifeless. You can look it up but it's more fun to go out and see it for yourself. The desert out there is quite beautiful and there are loads of critters.

Yes, but those critters are a long way away and so they don’t really exist.

I lived there. There is very little life in the Nevada salt flats.

You could restrict yourself to dry lake beds that don't flood in winter, which are nearly as lifeless as Mars, and still have enough landfill area for centuries of waste.

The average American produces 3.5 pounds of trash per day at an average one third of a gram per cubic centimeter. Assuming that holds steady, and we use a normal landfill depth of 400 feet, and the US population doubles over the next century, we need a landfill area of 250 square miles to cover us for the next hundred years.

Compared to available land that's tiny.

Using standard units:

- 1589g of trash per day!

- 4767 cm3 to store it (3cm3/gram)

- 130 m3 per lifetime (75yr)

- 300,000,000 lifetimes.

- 78 km3 storage allocated

- 39 km3 required

~~We're gonna need a bigger boat.~~

Neat!

> - 39,000,000,000 km3 required

I think something went very wrong there!

4767 x 75 x 365 = I get 130,500,000 cm³/person/lifetime. You got 130,000,000,000,000,000.

There are 10¹⁵ cubic centimetres in a cubic kilometre, not 10⁶. I think all your numbers are for m³, not km³, a factor of a billion out, so your final figure should be 39 km³.

Thanks, I've edited (working from mobile, some copy paste issues with long numbers). I think it's right now? (How do you get the ³?)

should be 39km2 not km3

Anywhere outside of a city centre, according to many. I live in a rural area. People drive out here from the city to dump their old appliances in the forests of this “junk land”. Almost every road corner has a pile of refrigerators and washing machines next to it. My current refrigerator was rescued from one of these impromptu landfills. Nothing at all wrong with it, just five years old, so it’s trash.

Just because you can’t see it, just because it doesn’t have value to property developers, does not make it junk.

I mean, by this logic, we should just dump our trash in the “junk water” which covers much of the planet.

Ok. I guess if you’re all of the view this is wrong, would you mind if I came and dumped stuff in your city apartment? It looks like junk to me.

I don't know why you decided someone saying the US has plenty of junk land must be talking about your home. I was referring to dry salt flats, abandoned strip mines, and the like. The vast amounts of space under major cities would also make good landfill volume.

Because the entire idea that land can be junk leads to a rapid broadening of the definition of junk. Your NIMBY attitude of “out of sight, out of mind” is exactly how we ended up in this mess in the first place.

Landfill? Somewhere buried?

Nevada. Just fill in old mines?

Bringing jobs back to Goldfield and Tonopah! And we needs more hands down Yellowjacket Mine

How important are those animals?