81–90 of 119 posts
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Until you go to your local landfill and see the massive fuming hellscape spanning thousands of acres with mountains of garbage just laying there and mentally extrapolate how it will look even 10 more years from now.
The largest landfill in the US was only 700acres after almost 60 years in operation supporting LA.
or ~3 square kilometers
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The technology of landfills has massively improved over the years. It's not the old pile of garbage covered in birds forever; they turn them into parks and whatnot. It's probably worth looking up, because there's some cool scientific advancements behind it. I'm pulling this next sentence completely out of my ass, but I also imagine it would be convenient, once we develop bacteria to break this stuff down in an enviro…
I'm super excited for all the plastic in the world and all the devices that we use everyday to rot because we developed a bacteria that eats it and now your iPhone internals have an infection and your phone just disintegrates and the steering wheel falls off your car
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See for example the Seattle "tips to recycle right" * Empty, Clean, and Dry * When in Doubt, Find Out * Keep Bags Out The page goes into detail on each. This isn't unusual in my experience. https://www.seattle.gov/utilities/your-services/collection-a... Here's an online tool to help people identify the various kinds of recyclables and direct them correctly. It isn't easy and I doubt few Seattle residents know all of…
How does this align with NPRs fairly recent report that recycling probably isn't even worth it? https://www.npr.org/2021/04/21/987111675/video-is-recycling-... How many hours have we (as a species) wasted sorting and meticulously managing our waste when the vast majority of it never gets recycled anyway? I'm asking the question as someone who cares deeply about the environment. I just think recycling is a fake soluti…
Some years ago, Switzerland completely stopped using landfills. All garbage is incinerated. The resulting slag is then processed to reclaim nearly all metals as well as some other important elements. Of course, the burning creates CO2. However, you don't have to mine and refine metal ores, and the incinerators also generate electricity and district heating. So the ecological balance is actually pretty good. As a fina…
>you don't have literal square miles of landfills that occupy land Land area is a non-issue. Google says Switzerland produces "80 to 90 million tonnes" of garbage per year. Assuming that garbage has the same density of water, and a landfill is 10 meters deep, a 1 sq mi landfill will last 287 years. Moreover, Wikipedia says Switzerland has 15,940 square miles of land, so that will only take up 0.006% of the country's…
Especially on long time scales.
I've heard that the biggest barrier to reuse is the expense of purifying the inputs of the various recycling processes. A few stray baked beans can gum up the works. If so the economics would be greatly changed by a robot running AI software that can just sort and wash trash the way we're supposed to at home.
I've never before heard anyone ever suggest that we're "supposed to" be sorting and washing our trash at home. What an unbelievably wasteful and pointless notion.
They also have the most over-packaged goods I have ever seen, individually wrapped sweets, cakes etc wrapped in a plastic box and given to you in a plastic bag (3 layers!) not being unusual. (There is now finally a plastic bag charge introduced last year.)
I like imagining that some of our large ore deposits are infact ancient garbage heaps from tens of millions of years ago.
"Trash economy. The abundance of trash. What are we gonna do with it? Are we gonna put it on an island? Are we gonna make it somebody else’s problem? Or are we going to take the initiative, and take this problem by the horns? Trash economy. You use cubes of trash as money. Everybody becomes rich, it’s a gold rush."
I've heard that the biggest barrier to reuse is the expense of purifying the inputs of the various recycling processes. A few stray baked beans can gum up the works. If so the economics would be greatly changed by a robot running AI software that can just sort and wash trash the way we're supposed to at home.
I've never before heard anyone ever suggest that we're "supposed to" be sorting and washing our trash at home. What an unbelievably wasteful and pointless notion.
You'll often see "rinse and replace cap" (some plastic bottles, some say toss the cap) or "rinse and insert lid" (metal cans).
I do feel like it's probably inefficient. I'm told not to rinse dishes because my dishwasher is better (which mine definitely is) but... I'm supposed to hand rinse garbage before recycling it?
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> Of course, the burning creates CO2 When burning trash CO2 is way down the list of things I worry about personally.
We need to reduce carbon emissions to zero in couple decades. Burning trash isn't an issue now, but we need to keep in mind that isn't really "green" when deciding to build more plants. The problem with burning trash is that it turns all of the carbon into CO2. Trash in landfill does produce methane which is worse greenhouse gas, but it sounds like landfill are starting to capture or burn methane. The best option is…
you will never reduce carbon dioxide emissions to zero per person; people emit carbon dioxide just by breathing. but the quantity determines whether or not it matters
the amount produced by burning garbage is a few times bigger than breathing
https://dercuano.github.io/notes/underground-arcology.html#a... has some of my notes on garbage; the high bit is that, in new york, residential and commercial waste is about a tonne per person per year, mostly things like paper and plastic which burn to carbon dioxide and water. so you might emit two tonnes of the dioxide per person per year by burning their trash
as explained in https://dercuano.github.io/notes/underground-arcology.html#a... a person breathing produces about a kg per day or 400 kg per year, hopefully sourced from the air via plants. so, too, is most of the combustible garbage
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions explains that human carbon dioxide emissions are about 35 gigatonnes per year, about 4½ tonnes per person per year
now, probably people in new york throw away more garbage and burn more fossil fuels than average, so these numbers are maybe not as close as they appear; but the fossil fuels number doesn't make the potential garbage burnination number totally insignificant like i thought it would
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If mining landfills was profitable, recycling would be profitable even before that.
I thought recycling was sometimes profitable? At least for metals