> might well be a complete waste of time

Do you think that having all plastics spread through a landfill is better than having them grouped even if residing the in the same landfill? I think sorting your trash is never lost time on a global scale. Anything done to make it easier for future generations to handle garbage should be done, even if it has no immediate benefit.

I actually don't understand why it's significantly better for the landfill to be arranged in one way rather than another. Can you explain why it helps future generations?

If at some future time, we actually find a way to recover plastic / oils / utility from plastic that's sitting in a landfill, someone will then go back and dig up landfills to find it. If every trash bag has 10-15% plastic in it, because we don't bother to sort our stuff now, that's much less efficient than finding the part of the landfill that is 80% plastic.

My landfill has mixed stream recycling that they sort and sell, because it's cheaper to sort it than it is to put it into the on site landfill.

Is the theory that someone is paying them for the sorted, baled plastic, trucking it elsewhere and then putting it into a landfill?

Depending on the markets, you sometimes have to pay to get a recycler to take your plastic. At that point it's a choice based on whether the landfill fees are cheaper (sometimes they are).

I'm pretty sure the point of recycling to make people feel like they are doing something about plastic pollution, and this feeling distracts people from the fact that nothing you do with plastic actually makes a difference.

Perception is 9/10s of the law.

> nothing you do with plastic actually makes a difference

... yet.

Do you think that in a wonderful future where we get some technical advancement to be able to deal with plastics effectively, will it be easier to deal with it when it's uniformly spread through the world's landfills, or when it's sorted and dumped in bulk?

This is why I continue to dutifully rinse out plastics and throw them into the landfill via the separate 'recycling' process. I'd rather it go to the special plastic landfill, where, like cryogenically-frozen Effective Altruists, future generations can give it a new life with yet-undiscovered technology.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but yes, that's exactly what I'm doing too.

I, too, will keep using the separate stream, more out of habit than anything else. But the plastic doesn't currently go into a special landfill, it goes into the same ones as all of the other trash.

<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/17/climate/ask-nyt-climate-r...>

[I]f the [recycling] plant can find a buyer at a price that makes sense, the bundles will be shipped off to a recycling plant. Sometimes a local one, and sometimes one as far away as Africa or Southeast Asia. If they can’t, everything goes into a landfill or gets incinerated.

And even though my original comment is at zero, the industry specifically pushed recycling because by making people feel like they were helping, they would ignore the real problem.

<https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...>

Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true.

"If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR."

Burying the plastic is probably the better option.

<https://www.ft.com/content/901c78e6-b4d0-467c-ab87-6fc44c8a0...>

“The energy required to do reprocessing is higher than the energy required to make the [plastic] in the first place,” he said. To limit carbon emissions in line with the global warming goals of the Paris climate accord, it would be better to “bury the stuff”, according to Hallett.

Sure, but if a truck that picked up sorted plastic arrives at the landfill, it's going to be dumped all in one place. If at any time in the future we devise a way to efficiently get rid of it, it's easier to remove it from one single place, than having to sift through tonnes of unsorted trash.

I frankly think that an enterprise that can build robots able to sort landfills would make mint.

If and when that future arrives, we will have plenty of plastic waste to deal with, without digging up that which is buried.

Buried plastic is largely inert. It is one of the least nasty things that is in a landfill.