Hacker News Reader

Comment by nsb1 | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: From a climate change point of view, burying anything that contains carbon is basically the definition of sequestering that carbon. Why is it bad to bury anything that contains carbon?

The obvious response, I think, would be that if we consume and bury 'stuff', then we'll just make more 'stuff', but what's wrong with that? Is it the energy required (presumably from burning fossil fuels) to produce more 'stuff' that's really the problem? It doesn't seem like we have the whole picture on how much energy is actually spent preparing recycled materials for re-use to make an accurate comparison.

View on HN

>if we consume and bury 'stuff', then we'll just make more 'stuff'

There is also a flawed assumption here that these are connected. We will make more stuff whether or not we bury other stuff.

Recyclable stuff make that connected though. Paper can be recycled a bunch of time, plastic too. Sure we can't reuse 100% of what we waste, but any percent is better than none.

A lot of buried carbon is digested by anaerobic bacteria, which produce Methane (also a greenhouse gas), so there's that.

True, but some landfills capture that methane and pump it back into the natural gas grid. I don't know the details of how efficient or widespread this type of capturing scheme is, but it seems to me like this is probably actually more sustainable than using natural gas from drilling and fracking.

Usually they just burn it on-site through generators in containers.

It’s too dirty to put in the natural gas grid.

Ah, thanks for the correction, I didn't realize that. Still seems like it's not a bad way to generate electricity though.

You weren’t totally wrong, just not the most correct :)

I looked up the numbers, in the US, it’s something like 70% burn on-site for electricity, 20% burn in some nearby use (e.g. process steam or greenhouse warming) and 10% was cleaned up enough to pipe into the natural gas grid.

That’s by facility count, not BTUs.

The British Plastics Federation have a nice (well, colourful) page on their website detailing the various ways plastic goods and packaging can be reused, recycled, etc - https://www.bpf.co.uk/packaging/recycling.aspx

To quote from that page: "Disposal: No plastics should be put in landfill. Currently 26% of all plastic in the UK still goes to landfill" ... so if the plastics industry itself has finally got the message that burying their product (or dumping it in the sea) is not a good idea, I don't think I'd want to change their thinking by introducing them to ideas about carbon sequestration in landfills.

This is also a good argument for obesity. After all, a pound gained is a pound sequestered. [/s]

Reply on news.ycombinator.com