"Sweden burns nearly all its trash, much of it in lieu of recycling" is an equally true but very different sounding headline.
Halfway down, some controversy is mentioned:
> “Waste-to-energy prevents proper recycling and makes climate change worse.” Vahk is also skeptical about the plants’ safety. “Our recent report found high levels of persistent organic pollutants like dioxins or furans around waste incinerators in three countries.”
And Sweden imports trash to burn, raking in $100m/year in doing so.
I'm not at all against trash incineration, especially if they are capturing the energy, but there a many incentives (financial and feel-good) to paint it one way or another. It's simply a series of tradeoffs that we should be cognizant of.
I'm also not particularly against landfills, which are in a sense merely a form of carbon and pollutant sequestration. Not mentioned in the article is that many landfills also trap that methane gas and then burn it to do more or less the same energy reclamation process, and that this is potentially less energy intensive and less pollutant intensive, since they are not burning plastics etc. It would be nice if they had a comparison.
Trouble is proper [Plastic] recycling is expensive and rarely done - in UK governmnet pays by the ton for recycling, which mostly consists of companies that pay another poorer country to take our trash, where it is usually not properly disposed of, and it ends up burnt or in the ocean.
Internatuonal trash trade should really be illegal - it is fundamentally uncontrollable, full of fraud and corruption.
I would rather we manage the trash here imperfectly, wherether that's landfilling or burning. At here we can have a handle on it.
> Trouble is proper recycling is expensive and rarely done
Especially with plastics. There have been plenty of stories in the past year or two showing that it's basically all been a sham and that it just ends up in the trash.
In Poland, there are many criminal groups which form companies and take waste (usual toxic, sometimes regular municipal) from Western clients and bury them into the ground or just dump on some rented lot. There are hundreds of such cases now.
Government is finding these lots full of dangerous chemicals and has to spend taxpayer money to properly dispose of them (it can be as high as 20 milion EU per lot).
Apparently it has started a couple years ago when China banned importing EU waste.
I wish every journalist writing about complex environmental topics would just start every first draft with that sentence, and then evolve it into an article.
I've really become exhausted at the first world default assumption that something is wrong if it's not a win-win situation. Is that not a part of the psychology of many who can't accept things like nuclear and natural gas as alternatives to arguably worse solutions because there are those tradeoffs? I agree that it would be great if journalists could move from win-win thinking to tradeoffs thinking, and that's a transition that globalized societies should move towards as well.
Respectfully. If they were true journalist they would do this. Unfortunately, we too often get hacks posing as journalists.
We, The Public, need to stop giving credit where credit is not due.
Put another way, if your pet barked would you call it a cat? Of course not, yet we allow hacks to pass themselves off as journalists. Such language abuse is Orwellian, at best.
I am all against trash incineration. The bulk of it is hydrocarbons (plastics/paper etc). Burning means turning solid or liquid carbon into gaseous CO2. Imho a kilo of carbon buried in a landfill is less damaging than a kilo of it floating around the atmosphere.
I've started to see a degree of synergy in landfills. Carbon is extracted from the ground in solid or liquid forms (mined coal/oil). Burning it into CO2 causes climate change. But landfills bury carbon back in the ground from whence it came, at least out of the atmosphere. Turning trash into invisible CO2 might look good but is doesn't help the climate. We might not like the sight of trash piles but we need to have a serious talk about whether burying is actually worse than releasing yet more carbon into the atmosphere. Nothing ever really goes away.
What you say is true, but the alternative used by neighboring countries right now is that the garbage is buried in the ground while gas, oil and coal are produced or imported and burned in the place of trash.
This is a only because we make things out of fossil fuel. When we stop doing that burning garbage will not be a problem.
Keep in mind that the burning often replace other forms of burning to generate power/heat. Until all power/heat generation is clean this will not matter.
For any country that has a coal or gas plant this will not increase emissions but will make dealing with hazardous material easier.
Incinerators can emit 2.5 times more greenhouse gasses than coal-fired plants, according to a 2021 Earthjustice report. They emit up to 18 times more lead and 14 times more mercury, along with elevated levels of other harmful emissions, it said. ref: https://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/2022/04/01/burning...
I'm with you in that I'm not unilaterally condemning one method but it'd be helpful to have some progress-based comparisons. eg: Compared to burying, burning reduces % of methane emissions. Outputs of these toxins increases by %, primarily affecting a region of sq mi. Overall, burning [effects] CO2 by %.
I generally agree with all the points in that report, but note they are talking about US plants, located in minority areas, that regularly fail to meet the US standards for air quality, and don't seem particularly motivated to do so for whatever reason.
You can have crappy, low-tech, poorly-regulated coal plants / landfills / trash incinerators etc. that do worse than the average of examples of the same tech.
Proper landfill management includes capturing and burning that gas, that gets trapped there and is toxic if you let the pressure build up enough for it to escape.
How does one deal with ground water pollution when just leaving trash in the ground? It must be much easier to clean pollutants like heavy metals from gases , than it is to clean whatever the rain dissolves out from under a landfill? Being Swedish, the idea of leaving trash in a hole at all feels strange. But then I'm assuming incineration is reasonably "clean" in the sense that pollutants can be filtered.
Being completely ignorant of the process, I don't understand how burning would possibly make it better. Let's say that you perfectly filter/capture bad stuff (and I'm extremely skeptical of both our ability to do it, and industry claims of our ability to do it). What do you do with it then... other than, put it in the ground / find some way to store it, and now we're back where we started?
I think a lot of us have this childhood mental image that "burning makes stuff go away". But it doesn't!
> And Sweden imports trash to burn, raking in $100m/year in doing so.
Which is basically nothing. Sweden's annual expenditure is $100 billion, meaning this covers 0.1% of their expenses. That's the equivalent of a person on 50k getting $50 as some offm
Agreed with all of the rest of your points though!
Yeah I'm a little skeptical of the "we make less of this ... because we make a whole lot of that" kinda trades. Not that it can't be a good trade, but for me "less landfill" is not the biggest fight I'd want to fight ...
One should remember that the comparison shouldn't necessarily be between burning trash and digging it down, so long as anything else would be burned instead of the trash, for energy. And that's (unfortunately) still the case at least some parts of the year for Sweden, i.e. that the renewable and nuclear doesn't completely cover the electricity/heating needs.
So the comparison in that situation is between on the one hand to burn trash, and on the other hand putting thash in a landfill and then burning fossil fuels.
I don't understand people's aversion to landfills. Perhaps it's because people intuitively understand that dumping garbage is not sustainable indefinitely, i.e. Earth will eventually run out of room. However, there is currently plenty of space for landfills. I think more things should go into landfills. Don't try to recycle plastic, just make sure it securely ends up in a landfill without ending up in the ocean and lock it away forever. That seems great. Why you'd want to take a perfectly stable thing and combust it, potentially leaking toxins into the atmosphere and environment, is beyond me.
I used to work designing landfills and they're not a bad choice. Right now many landfills in the us are the worlds largest bags. They definitely are now better engineered so that toxic substances have less chance of leaching into the ground.
They roll out large sheets of plastic and weld them together. Some states (NY) require dual liners (bags in a bag) and piping to collect the liquid that comes out at the bottom "(leachate). When they put the plastic top on holes are made to allow waste gas to escape. Landfills tend to be dry and nothing rots in them.
I think they work well, but its better to reduce the waste going into them. I'm assuming many places in the world aren't handling the trash like this leading to issues with groundwater contamination and other problems.
How is the leachate treated? That must be a mix of lots of (unknown) bad stuff.
Isn't the main problem that landfills aren't sustainable? Burning is bad for CO2 in the atomsphere, but it frees up de-bonds matter so they can be taken up again.
>I don't understand people's aversion to landfills. Perhaps it's because people intuitively understand that dumping garbage is not sustainable indefinitely, i.e. Earth will eventually run out of room. However, there is currently plenty of space for landfills.
That's exactly it. It's the whole reason why there was a huge recycling push in the 80s/90s.
>GONZALEZ: There were all these stats coming out at the time that showed that the number of landfills in America was plummeting. Landfills were closing, and people kept citing these stats in stories about the garbage barge.
>KINNAMAN: And so people put it all together, and in their minds, the conclusion was that the United States is running out of landfill space. The United States was full - that we couldn't store any more.
If the trash was sorted so we buried "caches" of plastic separate from chemicals, cardboard, electronics, etc I think there is some short term sense here. My issue with landfills is that mixing all that stuff into a big pile in the ground just makes more useless for the future. I believe that future us might find a way to make use of some of these types of waste if they were separated and easy to get back. To put it another way, at least make it as easy as possible for the future to try to fix this if we must be so wasteful.
My point is that plastic comes from oil stored in the ground. There is nothing wrong with taking oil out of the ground, turning it into plastic, and then putting the plastic back in the ground. "Recycled" plastic packaging is much worse. Oil is taken out of ground and turned in to plastic, which is then shipped to south east Asia or Africa for recycling, Most of the plastic can't economically be recycled and ends up in the ocean due to poor sanitation standards, and then finally you get your recycled plastic packaging after the recycled plastic is shipped back to you.
The majority of which come from food waste that's left to decompose in the landfill. Those could and should be separated for composting. The released methane and stuff can also be captured.
Like many articles on the same topic, this is very scant on the ecological consequence of burning things. Because things go “puff” and you can’t seem them doesn’t mean the problem is gone. That’s why ICE car drivers think what they do is fine. If you’d ask them how big is the cloud of toxic pollutants that they emit, they’d struggle to imagine even the scale (it’s a basic estimation based on two numbers that are in front of them at all times).
This sentence is alarming and should lead to a lot more investigation than what the article gives them:
> “Our recent report found high levels of persistent organic pollutants like dioxins or furans around waste incinerators in three countries.”
Because dioxin is nowhere near as innocuous as CO2: that’s what Russia used to disfigure the former President of Ukraine, Victor Yushchenko. I feel like “Oh, yeah, we are releasing a lot of arsenic in the air” wouldn’t be dismissed as casually.
"That’s why ICE car drivers think what they do is fine." I'm sorry what? ICE car drivers don't have an option to think most of time because there are no other options. For almost the entirety of driving there have been two options, gas or diesel. Hybrids have slowly started to arrive, electric cars even slower. This idea that everyone is just out there picking ICE cars because they don't care what comes out the tail pipe is a joke. People are broke, finance cars to 96 month terms, for a $17,000 used car. If there were affordable options for hybrid or electric cars sure, but this grand idea that the general public has a choice in the matter grinds my gears.
Do we even know how much/whether fully electric cars are ecologically better than ICE cars?
The tires are just as bad on electric cars. The humongous batteries are expensive to produce and hard to efficiently recycle. The energy used to charge an electric car still has to be created somehow, which in practice often includes... combustion.
> Because things go “puff” and you can’t seem them doesn’t mean the problem is gone.
In many cases it is, because proper incineration leads to chemical degradation of waste to simpler compounds. There are still some ash and flue gases that needs to be properly handled.
> “Our recent report found high levels of persistent organic pollutants like dioxins or furans around waste incinerators in three countries.”
Three incinerators out of...? And why a potential violation of EU regulation would mean that incineration as a hole is bad?
There are plenty of incredibly clean incinerators, with emissions of dioxins and furans so low that you need to accumulate them over multiple days to be able to even detect them sometimes. If you use that recovered energy for heating, you probably avoid emitting other pollutants (even dioxins and furans).
The alternative is landfill disposal of non-inert waste, which is way worse than any kind of incineration, and it is very hard and complex to manage properly. There are plenty of landfill disasters.
The amount of solid waste I generate daily is amazing. Most of it is from single use consumer product packaging. There should be a standardized consumer container to deliver goods, sort of a shipping container for consumers. The consumer container could be cleaned and reused, or the container destroyed and the material recycled, or the material could be biodegradable.
Every kind of packaging should be from some (very clearly visually distinguishable, e.g. with a mandated specific color) single recyclable/compostable material. No more mixed-material packages of (non-biodegradable) plastic film stuck to cardboard. No more one-off specialty plastics for packaging. No more wrapping sheets of plastic around everything. No more Mylar. No more plastic single-piece candy wrappers. No more loads of plastic tape everywhere. A lot more cardboard / waxed paper food packaging. Etc. And vendors should pay whatever the full lifecycle of their products/packaging costs.
It should be possible for every consumer to easily clean and sort their waste into a relatively small number of bins, or for a recycling sorting center to easily sort mixed-stream waste into the appropriate homogeneous categories. Everything that can’t be easily sorted should be required to be biodegradable.
I'm amazed more people don't push this. Germany's bottle laws (weaker now than they once were) was a clear step in the right direction. I'd love to see something similar for everything I consume.
That's a great prompt for some fun industrial design especially for liquids - meeting criteria of being strong, packable, easily cleaned, easy to pour, etc. Fun!
I talked to the local waste trucking company about it and was told that to build a plasma gasification plant would require handling the trash from several New England states to make it economical. Otherwise they wouldn't have enough trash to keep it fed.
Readit News
Halfway down, some controversy is mentioned:
> “Waste-to-energy prevents proper recycling and makes climate change worse.” Vahk is also skeptical about the plants’ safety. “Our recent report found high levels of persistent organic pollutants like dioxins or furans around waste incinerators in three countries.”
And Sweden imports trash to burn, raking in $100m/year in doing so.
I'm not at all against trash incineration, especially if they are capturing the energy, but there a many incentives (financial and feel-good) to paint it one way or another. It's simply a series of tradeoffs that we should be cognizant of.
I'm also not particularly against landfills, which are in a sense merely a form of carbon and pollutant sequestration. Not mentioned in the article is that many landfills also trap that methane gas and then burn it to do more or less the same energy reclamation process, and that this is potentially less energy intensive and less pollutant intensive, since they are not burning plastics etc. It would be nice if they had a comparison.
Tradeoffs everywhere.
Trouble is proper [Plastic] recycling is expensive and rarely done - in UK governmnet pays by the ton for recycling, which mostly consists of companies that pay another poorer country to take our trash, where it is usually not properly disposed of, and it ends up burnt or in the ocean.
Internatuonal trash trade should really be illegal - it is fundamentally uncontrollable, full of fraud and corruption.
I would rather we manage the trash here imperfectly, wherether that's landfilling or burning. At here we can have a handle on it.
Edit - spesified plastic
Especially with plastics. There have been plenty of stories in the past year or two showing that it's basically all been a sham and that it just ends up in the trash.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
Apparently it has started a couple years ago when China banned importing EU waste.
I wish every journalist writing about complex environmental topics would just start every first draft with that sentence, and then evolve it into an article.
We, The Public, need to stop giving credit where credit is not due.
Put another way, if your pet barked would you call it a cat? Of course not, yet we allow hacks to pass themselves off as journalists. Such language abuse is Orwellian, at best.
I've started to see a degree of synergy in landfills. Carbon is extracted from the ground in solid or liquid forms (mined coal/oil). Burning it into CO2 causes climate change. But landfills bury carbon back in the ground from whence it came, at least out of the atmosphere. Turning trash into invisible CO2 might look good but is doesn't help the climate. We might not like the sight of trash piles but we need to have a serious talk about whether burying is actually worse than releasing yet more carbon into the atmosphere. Nothing ever really goes away.
Keep in mind that the burning often replace other forms of burning to generate power/heat. Until all power/heat generation is clean this will not matter.
For any country that has a coal or gas plant this will not increase emissions but will make dealing with hazardous material easier.
Indeed.
Incinerators can emit 2.5 times more greenhouse gasses than coal-fired plants, according to a 2021 Earthjustice report. They emit up to 18 times more lead and 14 times more mercury, along with elevated levels of other harmful emissions, it said. ref: https://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/2022/04/01/burning...
I'm with you in that I'm not unilaterally condemning one method but it'd be helpful to have some progress-based comparisons. eg: Compared to burying, burning reduces % of methane emissions. Outputs of these toxins increases by %, primarily affecting a region of sq mi. Overall, burning [effects] CO2 by %.
You can have crappy, low-tech, poorly-regulated coal plants / landfills / trash incinerators etc. that do worse than the average of examples of the same tech.
I personally think that landfills are underrated, but is this true? Landfills produce a lot of methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas.
A good chunk of this organic waste can instead be composted.
The main benefit of composting, as I see it, isn't to enrich the soil of whatever, but to prevent greenhouse gas emissions from landfill.
https://www.epa.gov/landfills/municipal-solid-waste-landfill...
I think a lot of us have this childhood mental image that "burning makes stuff go away". But it doesn't!
Which is basically nothing. Sweden's annual expenditure is $100 billion, meaning this covers 0.1% of their expenses. That's the equivalent of a person on 50k getting $50 as some offm
Agreed with all of the rest of your points though!
That would be alarming news in a country that doesn't burn oil or coal like a dioxin junkie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_hierarchy#/media/File:Wa...
So the comparison in that situation is between on the one hand to burn trash, and on the other hand putting thash in a landfill and then burning fossil fuels.
They roll out large sheets of plastic and weld them together. Some states (NY) require dual liners (bags in a bag) and piping to collect the liquid that comes out at the bottom "(leachate). When they put the plastic top on holes are made to allow waste gas to escape. Landfills tend to be dry and nothing rots in them.
I think they work well, but its better to reduce the waste going into them. I'm assuming many places in the world aren't handling the trash like this leading to issues with groundwater contamination and other problems.
Isn't the main problem that landfills aren't sustainable? Burning is bad for CO2 in the atomsphere, but it frees up de-bonds matter so they can be taken up again.
That's exactly it. It's the whole reason why there was a huge recycling push in the 80s/90s.
>GONZALEZ: There were all these stats coming out at the time that showed that the number of landfills in America was plummeting. Landfills were closing, and people kept citing these stats in stories about the garbage barge.
>KINNAMAN: And so people put it all together, and in their minds, the conclusion was that the United States is running out of landfill space. The United States was full - that we couldn't store any more.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/739893511
This sentence is alarming and should lead to a lot more investigation than what the article gives them:
> “Our recent report found high levels of persistent organic pollutants like dioxins or furans around waste incinerators in three countries.”
Because dioxin is nowhere near as innocuous as CO2: that’s what Russia used to disfigure the former President of Ukraine, Victor Yushchenko. I feel like “Oh, yeah, we are releasing a lot of arsenic in the air” wouldn’t be dismissed as casually.
I'm sitting on an electric suburban train. I don't know where the energy comes from, but there's a lot less needed than any car.
The tires are just as bad on electric cars. The humongous batteries are expensive to produce and hard to efficiently recycle. The energy used to charge an electric car still has to be created somehow, which in practice often includes... combustion.
In many cases it is, because proper incineration leads to chemical degradation of waste to simpler compounds. There are still some ash and flue gases that needs to be properly handled.
What makes you think anyone who suggests this is a good idea is under the impression that incineration makes things go away?
Three incinerators out of...? And why a potential violation of EU regulation would mean that incineration as a hole is bad?
There are plenty of incredibly clean incinerators, with emissions of dioxins and furans so low that you need to accumulate them over multiple days to be able to even detect them sometimes. If you use that recovered energy for heating, you probably avoid emitting other pollutants (even dioxins and furans).
The alternative is landfill disposal of non-inert waste, which is way worse than any kind of incineration, and it is very hard and complex to manage properly. There are plenty of landfill disasters.
It should be possible for every consumer to easily clean and sort their waste into a relatively small number of bins, or for a recycling sorting center to easily sort mixed-stream waste into the appropriate homogeneous categories. Everything that can’t be easily sorted should be required to be biodegradable.
Only .4% is landfill gas.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Can someone explain why how that fits together?
Edit: seems to really depend on what kind of waste you are looking at. Sweden's landfill rate for waste excluding major mineral waste is still 8%: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/t2020_rt110/d...
the 1% target is reached only for waste collected by the municipality: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/municipal-wast...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
I talked to the local waste trucking company about it and was told that to build a plasma gasification plant would require handling the trash from several New England states to make it economical. Otherwise they wouldn't have enough trash to keep it fed.