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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Only if you're only looking at it from a co2 emissions perspective. If you consider other forms of air pollution and the sibling comment is correct[1], burning garbage is probably worse than burning coal. It's definitely worse than a natural gas power plant.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30957607

Does your opinion change if it's coupled with proper carbon capture and sequestration?

Now is not the time to burn trash. If you get carbon capture, we are better applying it to natural gas first (AKA, right now), and only extend it to trash once global warming is more under control.

I'm also skeptic about the rarer pollutants. How much mercury and lead are they throwing at the environment? (Surely, it's controlled, but how well is it controlled?) What else is on that trash? (That certainly isn't controlled.)

Proper trash recycling will probably use a burning stage once we get it. And I'm all for experiments on it. But I really don't think we currently have the tech to do it right, and the CO2 problem is a huge one right now.

>> proper carbon capture and sequestration?

Just skip the burning step. Get electricity from sun/wind/nuclear and "sequester" the trash. New branding for landfills: "Early-cycle carbon sequestration and storage facilities". They could sell carbon credits for every ton of carbon they inter in their below-ground solid carbon storage facilities.

Maybe? Even clean plastic degrades eventually (although I don't have a sense of how the timelines compare with modern carbon sequestration approaches), and much of the waste is probably things that decompose into methane and/or CO2 much faster. Meanwhile, you're not going to get much solar power at the times of year when Sweden probably most needs energy generation.

The point is very well taken from other comments, though, that pollutants other than CO2 are probably also a significant concern even if CCS is, in isolation, up to the task.

On the other hand, temporary carbon sequestering is still way better than immediate release.

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.

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