Anyone who thinks recycling plastic is some sort of normative good because "waste is bad" clearly hasn't put any thought into what environmental issues need to be focused on right now.
TLDR You must engineer around the human. Potentially harmful physical matter that requires waste management? Default to destruction vs storage, if at all possible. You have now defaulted to success instead of failure.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38994374
Once the plastics are captured, I don't see too much benefit in incinerating it beyond freeing up landfill space. But that's really not a major issue as you can always dig a deeper and wider landfill.
In fact, a major downside of incinerating the plastic is you end up with greenhouse gasses as a byproduct.
https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-ga...
> Municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States, accounting for approximately 14.4 percent of these emissions in 2022. The methane emissions from MSW landfills in 2022 were approximately equivalent to the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from more than 24.0 million gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for one year or the CO2 emissions from more than 13.1 million homes’ energy use for one year. At the same time, methane emissions from MSW landfills represent a lost opportunity to capture and use a significant energy resource.
TLDR Whether landfills or gasification, you are paying the piper regardless for emissions. Don't trust the human, pull forward the disposal.
I have no idea how you think plasma gasification -- requiring extreme amounts of energy -- is in any way helpful to our current environmental concerns. Unless we somehow magically start relying on 100% renewables, it seems like landfills are far-and-away the best way to go until we are able to grapple with climate change.
By the end of this year, the world will be deploying 660GW of solar annually. Within 18 months, that figure rises to 1TW/year (based on current manufacturing ramp trajectories).
On the contrary, I’m unsure how you think we don’t have the clean power for this, not even accounting for the power you can generate from the syngas that is a byproduct of the process. The process is not energy positive, but it’s also not wildly net negative due to the energy content of the matter being gasified.
> Plasma gasification uses around 800 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of power per ton of municipal solid waste (MSW).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01968...
I've been trying to advocate for slowing climate change since about 2000. I've been to enough city council meetings, and seen enough government promises simply abandoned to know that this is a deeply naive way to just "expect" the world to suddenly become rational.
Let's stop the actively bleeding artery that is actively killing us before we even start to worry some efficiency gains we could get by asking the surgeon to do two things at once.
This is the difference between an environmentalist and an "environmentalist."
We need to fix climate change now. Get to carbon neutral now. Literally nothing else matters much.
I would prefer that focus and expense be used to target reducing GHG's in the short run.
It is literally (part of) a solution to the problem you're bringing up.
> Because solar isn't balanced and we haven't fixed the duck curve.
Well, landfill management is something you could (mostly) only run whenever you have excess (solar) power on the grid. So it's an excellent consumer for intermittent generators.
That’s not realistic. You can and probably will have a complete excess of renewable energy on bright and windy days that is well beyond electrical demand, and at the same time rely on baseload power during still nights. Energy storage helps even things out, and plasma gasification is one possible way to store that energy.
> it seems like landfills are far-and-away the best way to go until we are able to grapple with climate change.
Incineration ends up being quite profitable in isolation. Take stuff worth negative X$ per ton and turn it into a smaller pile of stuff still worth negative X$ per ton. Generating power is a useful side effect, but not the main reason.
Hardly the best solution, but I argue the least worst solution. Landfilling is just too much risk considering leaching from lining failures (putting water tables and aquifers at risk from permanent contamination) and the lifetime of methane destruction that must be accounted for.
Capturing methane from compost should be easier than whole landfill. It also keeps the organics instead of losing them.
We can 'mine' landfills in the future, if that becomes economically viable.
> parts of Europe, Japan, the Nordics
The Nordics are a part of Europe.
DRY! :-)
> plastic decomposition
The submission suggests that landfills ain't dug, but just piled high. Digging a hole costs more time, money and effort than not digging a hole.
I've yet to see a truly viable solution in this space that can economically compete; it would be nice to see it happen.
Figure 1 in the linked paper gives the raw numbers for where PET bottles end up. [1]
it was said that because employees/building tenants contaminate the recycling bins with unrecyclable items including food waste, there was no point to do anything but combine it into the trash
however the recycling bins were kept presumably to keep people from protesting about trashing everything, and the memory of this news quickly faded
the same goes for recycling bins in downtown toronto - they're so contaminated that they go straight to landfill
Thing is, we need to find out ways to remove, reduce and recycle plastics as soon as possible. The US may have enough place to place landfills without impacting anyone, but densely settled Europe does not - we're having the requirement that landfills can only take up 10% of residential waste by 2035, the rest has to be either burned or recycled by then. And for that, we need technology to actually recycle the plastic waste to be ready at industrial scale, so we need to focus on that right now. Sorting trash, separating modern multi layer plastics (sometimes a dozen layers of different materials!), recovering polymer source compounds, a lot of that is still open topics that need to be researched.
Additionally, landfills are already bad for the environment - Grady points out the issue in his video indirectly: the birds eat the food waste from all the packaging and end up distributing (micro)plastic waste across the environment surrounding the landfills, which then ends up in the groundwater and surface water bodies. Also the birds pick up and distribute pathogens from the decomposing waste.
Side note: we also need plastics recycling to reduce our dependency on fresh oil products used to manufacture them. Again, the US has it a bit easier due to self-sufficient domestic oil production, but Europe does not.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/pdfs/news/expert/2018/4/story...
The US east of the Mississippi and the far west coast has similar (lower, but not by much) population density. However there is a lot of space in Alaska and west of the Mississippi that almost nobody lives in and that brings down the density measures.
Also, keep the set of allowed formules small.
This will serve two purposes, first, allow plastics to be actually recycled to a greater extent. Now, plastics are very much "mystery" items.
Second, it will reduce the amount of harmful and toxic additives in plastics.
Somehow we also need to stop producing so much junk, electronics which is not durable, packing material within packing material and so on. The externalised costs of so many things are huge, we need to somehow de-externalise the costs.
Another way of looking at it, is that your vision is not constructive, because you wave away the real solution as "not actionable". Parent does not propose concrete action, but neither do you. We can have meaningful discussion without everything having to be accompanied by a five-step plan.
For actionable reduction of waste, just look at how Europe has a comparable life style as the US, whilst using less resources and emitting less GHG equivalent. Not placing the EU on a pedestal. Just saying that reduction is not just possible, it's being done, as we speak. But it requires changes and is for sure a harder sell than "no need to change any habits, technology will save us".
Europe also doesn't tax "light trucks" as if they were bicycles nor force people into cars to survive.
The American mindset "I do what I do and you do what you do" worked in the 60s and 70s when people were unaware they're fucking the planet (as hard as they are), but I can't help but look down on wasteful people, they're subsidized by people doing their part (or continents doing their part)
However what I couldn't find was how much overall waste consumers create vs other sources, just this:
https://discardstudies.com/2016/03/02/municipal-versus-indus...
And it seems to imply that consumer behavior has little direct effect on the overall amount of waste we humans produce. Like, how many people would have to stop drinking canned beverages to see a decrease in bauxite tailings? Probably an unrealistic amount.
This is not axiomatic. The gases from the incineration can be put into productive use (cf. Vienna heating and providing hot water off of their incinerator), and the harmful stuff can be filtered (cf. Vienna where the incinerator is in a dense urban area, and an architectural masterpiece).
In the US, the EPA has had regulations around this since the late 70's; it's a cost of doing business at this point, not a wild new theoretical rule framework.
Yeah, and the as-yet-unattainable perfect is still the enemy of the currently-attainable good.
What environmental issues need to be focused on right now?
1st world business pays 3rd world business to take their plastic for "recycling" (mandatory air quotes). The 1st world gets credit for being a responsible environmentalist. The 3rd world business then dumps the plastic in a river or other convenient but totally not enviro-friendly dumping spot.
It's sort of an open conspiracy at this point. Putting your plastic in the trash may be better for the environment overall.
REDcycle (effectively Australia’s lone large-scale soft plastic recycling effort) folded and it was a big brouhaha
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/jan/30/redcy...
Good job taking down that "waste is bad" straw person.
But what about the EU or the EPAs (or a range of other relevant institutions) waste management hierarchy?
It would appear you've just placed almost the entire waste management industry, its regulators, and related academia in the "don't know what they are talking about" pile, which seems somewhat bold.
Are many ... not? Seems like a weird complaint, I haven't encountered an "environmentalist" (whatever that even is) that is against landfills in general or the engineering of it. I'd rather we didn't produce as much garbage as we are and I hate that our city makes me wrap my garbage in more garbage otherwise they won't pick it up. But I still find the engineering impressive.
https://news.google.com/search?q=environmentalist+landfills&...
Here's one from 3 days ago.
Garbage Lasagna’: Dumps Are a Big Driver of Warming, Study Says
Don't gaslight me and tell me environmentalists applaud all solutions to environmental issues equally. They have their own solutions, and activists often force things like recycling at all costs, even though it means shipping it across the world on polluting boats and having some other country dump it in their rivers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/climate/landfills-methane...
Perhaps whatever you have in mind has to do with people's desire to keep more garbage out of the landfill in the first place? I don't know.
> They have their own solutions, and activists often force things like recycling at all costs, even though it means shipping it across the world on polluting boats and having some other country dump it in their rivers.
I don't know what that's referring to but where I live, the vast majority of recycling does not leave the province. So I can't really empathize with the example, I'm aware of the trope though. Perhaps this is one of the things that's much different in the US and less so in other places.
That's a side effect of (way too) lax regulations and the externalities of disposing of plastics not being paid for!
Germany and a few other EU countries for example force any introducer of "recyclable" packaging to pay into a system to fund recycling stream collection, sorting and disposals ("Grüner Punkt" [1]). Yes, it's not perfect, way too much of our plastics waste still is exported to poor countries, but the ban on that is already law that will come into force in a few years [2].
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%BCner_Punkt
[2] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/plastikmuell-eu-einigt-sic...
I guess I consider myself an environmentalist, in that it's a relatively high priority to me to avoid causing unnecessary environmental destruction. I regularly take some effort to dispose of hazardous waste appropriately, etc, but I normally don't go around announcing my environmental priorities. It's not that I don't care, it's just that talking about it is usually not much fun, and is unlikely to help anything.
I think my attitude on the matter is pretty common in my area.
These are not bad people, but they don't know what they're talking about enough to form their own opinions, but they don't know that.
These types of people exist, and in worryingly large numbers.
I can't find anything about "organic" gas.
There might be some traces of it in the Internet archive.
[edit] there are traces here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210209184343/http://www.greenp...
It was prominently on their home page at some point, but I could not find it. I should have saved it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Federal_Republic_of_Ge...
You're perhaps talking about the downstream effects of sunsetting nuclear energy but even since then, the ratio of renewable energy has only increased. So what do you mean exactly?
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
They are also against fracking, which indirectly leads to more coal burning. Which is worse.
> [...] the ratio of renewable energy has only increased. So what do you mean exactly?
I would look at the CO2 emitted per Joule or something like that. Ie something that puts nuclear and coal into different baskets.
> Is that actually true?
> If you mean "over the last 20 years", then no, they weren't even a governing party between 2005 and 2021.
You don't have to be in cabinet to influence other parties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_90/The_Greens#Electio...
You don't even have to be in parliament to influence other parties.
As a rule we try to avoid putting landfills anywhere near someone's backyard, so it's not your usual hot topic for the zoning committee.
It all sounds and reads like a fairytale but none of this is sustainable.
You’re gonna have a tough time finding any evidence that running a landfill requires 84MW of electricity.
As far as I can tell, the EIA [1] suggests the average home uses 10,791 kWh a year. A gallon of gasoline contains ~33.7 kWh of energy per the EPA/Wikipedia [2].
This would mean that a single truck would be burning 70,000 * 10,791 / 33.7 = 22,414,540 gallons of gasoline a year or 61,409 gallons a day. Seems like wild bullshit to me.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent#:~:....
just heat alone is the largest waste product in a car or truck
Energy in = energy out + waste + energy stored
The truck is barely storing anything on average, so what you've described is energy out and waste, but the calculations to compare the truck to the landfill was done on Energy in - the amount of gas that it needs to be filled with.
For the same total job, you could raise or lower how quickly the truck goes through a tank of gas, but that variance has already been averaged out
(But yeah, the original claim still seems orders-of-magnitude off; clearly BS.)
[1] https://www.oregon.gov/deq/ghgp/Documents/ElectricGarbageTru...
There are plenty of hours in an year. You won't get any meaningful problem by complaining about the OP's approximations.
I know nothing about landfill engineering here, to be frank, simply being a grease for good online gearing.
for 1) various groups show heart-breaking images of wildlife suffering due to pollution, then work to mobilize the outrage into their solution. for 2), recycling programs should have had metrics, such as lbs of plastic "saved" from the landfill, energy saved from collecting cans, but also the counterpoints such as "tons of CO2 emitted by recycling trucks", and "dollars removed from poor people when local cash-for-cans businesses are shuttered". If the data show they emit more CO2 equivalent than they save, then they should concede that the program has failed. If the program needs a jump-start before it is "ecologically profitable", they should say so and agree to cancel the program if their goals aren't met by X date.
At least where I live, the garbage trucks have split compartments which means there's no additional trucks.
It’s a good thing we have electric motors, then. An additional benefit is that they are much less likely to wake you up when they get your bins at 5am.
I'm sure you can find plenty of people who check one or more of those boxes, but I'm interested to know if there's anyone who checks enough of them to be self-contradictory.
If you can't point me to one person who holds all beliefs, then you're falling for the classic fallacy of treating a group of individuals as is they were a hive mind. See comments about how "HN" both believes in unrestricted capitalism and supports privacy regulations.
So we’re on the same page, Wiktionary defines that as: one who advocates for the protection of the environment and biosphere from misuse from human activity.
(Not to mention that Trump tower would seem to exclude him from being against high rises.)
It also doesn't matter what you think Donald Trump does or does not believe. He has a 4 year track record, and is on record making comments about what he will do if elected again.
Trump himself has regularly expressed skepticism over anthropogenic global warming.
I’m… genuinely not sure you can reconcile this with a claim of him being an environmentalist on any axis.
Why would you say that it's unlikely? That's a very strange assumption to make - Hanlon has a whole razor about that. They're absolutely idiots. Or, put more politely and precisely, they're operating from intuition - "nature good, technology and/or human development bad" - without thinking about whether the ultimate consequences of what they're pushing for will properly advance their cause.
It turns out, if you take a wide and varied group, put all of the ideas that any of them have in a bag and shake it up, then assign all those ideas to all of them, you can claim them idiots. Or bad faith actors.
When really it’s the cheap rhetorical trick that is the real sign of idiocy.
Say what you will about “tax and spend” liberals but it’s a sight better than political faction that spends even more but forgets entirely about the revenue end of the equation.
Of course taxes are not a revenue optimization problem to those pointing the above out. It is the tax and spenders that should be looking at the above and are not (other than childish claims that trickle down doesn't work)
I'd think it's the claim that trickle down does work that is childish. It's had forty years to prove itself, and American workers are still waiting.
Anyway, the simple obvious solution (after reduce, reuse, recycle) is molten salt oxidation.
> Molten salt oxidation is a non-flame, thermal process that destroys all organic materials while simultaneously retaining inorganic and hazardous components in the melt. It is used as either hazardous waste treatment (with air) or energy harvesting similar to coal and wood gasification (with steam).
> Another option is to put it to beneficial use to create heat or even electricity. The Puente Hills landfill I showed earlier has a gas-to-energy facility that’s been running since 1987, and even though the landfill is now closed, it currently provides enough electricity to power around 70,000 homes.
And towards the end
> Landfills seem like an environmental blight, but really, properly designed ones play a huge role in making sure waste products don’t end up in our soil or air or water. It’s not possible to landfill waste everywhere... But my point is: landfills are a surprisingly low-impact way to manage solid waste in a lot of cases. I hope the future is a utopia where all the stuff we make maintains its beneficial value forever, but for now, I am thankful for the sanitary engineers and the other professions involved in safely and economically dealing with our trash so we don’t have to.
I love reading about landfills. I wish more environmentalists would be excited about engineering solving environmental ills and relied less on knee-jerk reactions.