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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

I found this interesting:

> 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.

View on HN

I genuinely use landfills, especially with plastic waste, as shibboleth to know whether I'm talking to somebody who is an environmentalist or somebody who is an "environmentalist."

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.

How do you feel about plasma gasification to ensure robust destruction of anything non-inert? I love landfills too! But humans are various shades of tricky, lazy, cost adverse, and untrustworthy (think limited liability) as it pertains to long term custodianship and management of things bad for people and the environment.

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722984

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification

The big problem with plastic waste is getting it to the landfill (or incinerator) in the first place.

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.

Certainly, you are generating some greenhouse gasses in the process, which is a trade off to ensure immediate waste destruction. To note, you will have to flare methane from the landfill in perpetuity when landfilled. If one is so inclined, internalize the cost of direct air carbon capture into the cost of waste disposal for those emissions.

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.

Point taken. Though I do wonder how much of the methane released is from plastic decomposition and how much of it is from food/biomaterial decomposition. I'd naively assume the primary emission would come from readily decomposable materials and that most plastics would remain fairly stable for a lot longer than yesterday's half eaten hamburger.

Indeed, waste sorting might improve the situation, but all available evidence indicates there is no will to do this (caveats being parts of Europe, Japan, the Nordics, and anywhere else diverse multi stream waste management can be effectively operated), which leads me to believe gasification is the superior path (with a bypass stream for glass, brick, earth, rock, and metals, primarily to prevent process efficiency reduction during gasification but also for reuse of those materials).

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.

What has been successful in my city, Portland, is separating the food and yard waste. The food and yard wastes are composted. Composting produces methane, but there is a trial to capture the methane which is burned as natural gas.

Capturing methane from compost should be easier than whole landfill. It also keeps the organics instead of losing them.

You don't really lose anything in a landfill. You just lock it up for a while.

We can 'mine' landfills in the future, if that becomes economically viable.

A wrinkle I read somewhere - organics in traditional landfills kept toxic materials like heavy metals "locked up", less risk of such stuff leeching out in the ground water.

What benefit would you get from gasification compared to just straight up burning the trash?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification#Advantages

Reads like it's worth than just straight up incineration. At least with current technologies. (Apart from perhaps the installation on that American military ship. Maybe. But that's just because they have unusual requirements.)

I'm generally down on sorting unless you have a lot of one particular type of waste. If you are not generating a full truck worth of that type of waste every week sorting efforts mean more trucks (since the truck with compartments for each type cannot hold as much waste because of the compartments, and also it has to go empty when one compartment fills). Combine that with the need verify the sorting was done correctly and it isn't worth it. We have made trade progress on automated sorting machines that solve a lot of problems - lets instead ban things that cannot be automatically sorted.

You're repeating yourself:

> parts of Europe, Japan, the Nordics

The Nordics are a part of Europe.

DRY! :-)

    > plastic decomposition

As I understand, most plastic is type 1 and 2 (PET bottles and such), and it never decomposes (on any reasonable human timeframe).

Interesting point I hadn't thought of! Had previously thought that obviously things should go straight in the ground to avoid CO2 emissions and hadn't thought about decomposition.

While I might be wrong, I seriously doubt the plastics creating the methane emissions you are referring to. That is almost certainly the organic matter.

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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/opinion/solar-power-free-...

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...

Because solar isn't balanced and we haven't fixed the duck curve. We're burning obscene amounts of nat gas, petroleum, and even coal currently. Until those numbers are at-or-near zero, every ounce of renewable electricity needs to be offsetting dirty electricity.

Think when these plants would come online. Think when solar and storage will be up to speed on the grid. Skate to where the puck is going to be. Think in systems. To say no today because of current state today is irrational and ignores the data. Enough sunlight falls on the Earth within ~30-60 minutes to power all of humanity for a year, and an enormous global clean energy flywheel is coming up to speed (first solar, with batteries right behind).

Yea, this is nonsense.

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.

It’s not human rationality, it’s cold, hard economics (scoped to renewables and storage uptake). Climate change is already happening, and there is nothing you can do to stop it immediately, just as you will get killed stepping in front of a freight train. You can only build systems that can attempt to outrace it to slow it down (various efforts to achieve net zero in a domain), and then eventually reverse it (an efficient, scalable carbon sequestration solution to existing atmospheric carbon load, powered by clean energy) over the next ~100-150 years.

The more I read about plasma gasification, the more it seems entirely fine and beneficial. The infrastructure just seems fairly expensive.

I would prefer that focus and expense be used to target reducing GHG's in the short run.

A substantial portion of the duck curve problem is overproduction at no-peak hours. Plasma gasification can take that excess strain off the grid and put it to useful work, while even providing a by-product that you can burn in the event that all of your renewables are underperforming, reducing the risk of relying on renewables.

It is literally (part of) a solution to the problem you're bringing up.

I've read up, and you have a good point.

I mostly agree with you. However:

> 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.

> Until those numbers are at-or-near zero, every ounce of renewable electricity needs to be offsetting dirty electricity.

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.

The more I read about plasma gasification, the more it seems entirely fine and beneficial. The infrastructure just seems fairly expensive.

First, I agree about methane source is organic matter, not plastics. I think OP would agree.

    > it seems like landfills are far-and-away the best way to go until we are able to grapple with climate change.

If this is true, why do so many different, highly developed nations use garbage incineration for large parts of their waste?

Money. Landfills aren’t cheap to operate and burning also reduces transportation costs.

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.

> But that's really not a major issue as you can always dig a deeper and wider landfill.

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.

Not OP but long been intrigued by possibilities in this domain (ever since Changing World Technologies promised to, um, change the world -- not plasma based but same proposition).

I've yet to see a truly viable solution in this space that can economically compete; it would be nice to see it happen.

It was so frustrating when a dude at work was trying to bust my balls for not using the recycling for my plastic bottle. I didn’t have the energy or patience to explain to him how our city has single stream recycling and there was 100% chance that bottle was being shipped overseas, dumped in the ocean or something else way more stupid than just being buried in the city landfill.

I worked in an office with recycling bins where everything was just gathered up and thrown in the dumpster with the rest of the garbage. It wasn't just our cleaning people, either: from my desk I could see the only two parking lot entrances and while the garbage truck came weekly, never once did I see a recycling truck.

likewise at a large office building I'm familiar with

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

PepsiCo did the same thing. Custodians dumped everything into the same bags. Leadership confirmed it all went to the dump. Still had a personal recycle bin crammed under every desk.

This is just corporate virtue signaling.

And/or ass-covering. There might be contracts in place etc.

More likely it costs the building cleaners time & money. No economic benefit for them so they don't bother even if overall there might be a benefit. Incentives need to align.

My town uses the same trucks for both.

You might not be seeing what you think you're seeing, WRT everything going into the same truck. Lots of municipalities (e.g. mine) undertake resource extraction from commingled waste & recycling streams. It isn't the same everywhere, but sometimes it's more efficient to just put the entire waste stream through the same extraction process to recover recyclable materials. The separate receptacles at the client side are obviously redundant, but sometimes those remain from legacy processing arrangements.

I heard this as well. There is a recycling plant that you need to run anyway to separate the waste/rubbish so you might as well use it to get the plastics and cans out. I think there is an argument that while the machine can do it well avoiding the machine does have benefits. This also doesn't work for paper or cardboard as it would get soiled from what I understand.

The real benefit of separate sources is those machines cannot handle things like plastic bags (they get caught in rollers and jam the machine), dirty diapers, and other such weird stuff. Once you get those out of the stream you may as well separate a few other things that are not recyclable so you need less of the expensive separation machines. However you always need sorting machines - people will make mistakes and so you need to verify everything really is recyclable.

Based on the single stream comment, I'm going to assume you're describing an experience in North America, and your assumptions are pretty off base for PET bottles.

Figure 1 in the linked paper gives the raw numbers for where PET bottles end up. [1]

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.13496

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/03/13/fix-recycling-a...

Yep, I've worked in recycling for 6 years and am well aware that there's a lot of broken parts. My point was that if a PET bottle goes into a single stream system, the recycling industry is pretty good at capturing it, baling it, and selling it to a plastics processor. That processor will clean it, pellet it, and sell it as rPET. 85% of PET bottles that end up in curbside single stream end up getting recycled. I'd like that number higher, but it's where things are at the moment. Throw a bottle in the trash, it's getting landfilled/burned. Throw it in recycling, it's most likely getting recycled.

In Australia the whole hard VS soft plastic blew up recently. The REDcycle brand by mayor supermarkets was shown to just collect and store the soft plastic in large warehouses. For bottles there is a refund scheme.

> 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.

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...

Europe is not densely populated. There is plenty of empty space, they just have decided to place rules on how that space is used.

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.

Waste is inherently problematic, regardless of how we manage it. While burning plastic for energy might seem like a solution, it's not ideal. We can generate clean electricity through other means that are cheaper and less polluting. Burning waste still releases harmful toxins into the environment and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions – even if it reduces landfill methane, which is a potent contributor to climate change. Ultimately, the best approach is to minimize waste generation in the first place, as this prevents both environmental harm and the need for costly and imperfect solutions.

It does seem like we are producing an unnecessarily large amount of waste, but the last sentence does not come of as constructive to me, because it doesn't offer any concrete action we can take towards a goal of reducing waste. Instead if comes of as sidestepping the issue of dealing with the waste we have.

That's one way of looking at it.

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".

Many if not all "large" (50k) cities in Sweden burn their trash for district heating, we filter most bad stuff out with filters, it still releases CO2, but burning it means it won't start producing methane, which is a worse greenhouse gas.

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)

I'll pitch in. Standardize on a strict set of allowed mixtures of plastics (and possibly even colors!). Not just "PP", "ABS" and so on, but exact formulas.

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.

How do you make China adhere?

Prohibit importing non-compliant goods. Do compliance checking in ports and punish local importers, both companies and their owners/executives, for noncompliance.

I don't think the political will to do this exists. From the perspective of the state we care way more about drugs than we do about plastics, but people have been ordering asthma drugs, psychedelics, stimulants, steroids, and retinoids from Indian pharmacies successfully for at least a decade now, which makes me think that it's a hard problem to solve at scale.

I don't think the political will exists do much of anything which is hard, definitely not to coördinate laws on plastics. But to compare import of stimulants to plastics... I don't think it's the same thing. Nobody is going to gray import a plastic toothbrush from China just to get that extra cadmium.

You don't and they won't.

It comes down to the 3 Rs: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. There's a reason Recycle is the last word in that mantra. It's the most expensive of the three things a person can do. The other two are about habits, and those really are things you have to just decide you want to change.

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.

> Burning waste still releases harmful toxins into the environment and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions – even if it reduces landfill methane, which is a potent contributor to climate change

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).

Tokyo also has many, many urban incinerators.

Yes they exist and they work. However to build them requires stringent regulations to make them a viable cost solution. If it is ok to blow out the toxic smoke the high end solution will not be built. The best thing is still avoiding waste.

> However to build them requires stringent regulations to make them a viable cost solution

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.

> The best thing is still avoiding waste.

Yeah, and the as-yet-unattainable perfect is still the enemy of the currently-attainable good.

Is recycling plastic bad?

What environmental issues need to be focused on right now?

Much plastic recycling is a sham.

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.

To self-checkout at my local grocery store, I have to clear a reminder that any soft plastic recycled through the store over the last x years was in fact not recycled and stockpiled around Australia in warehouses “waiting” for it to become economically feasible (it never did)

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...

“Recycling” sometimes (often) includes burning it in waste-to-energy incinerators, which emit CO2 and other pollutants just as if the original oil had been burned directly instead of taking a detour via a plastic product. It would be better to put waste plastic in a carbon storage device, a.k.a. a landfill. At least that way we are caching a little bit of easy-access fuel to help re-bootstrap civilization in case of global catastrophe.

Ironically, just from this comment I get the impression that you are misinformed about environmental issues.

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.

Piling our waste on/in the ground has 1000x less harmful side effects than the waste we burn and spray into the air from hundreds of millions different locations.

Is there data to back this claim?

Yeah, the environmentalists are the problem here. /s

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).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_oxidation

> I wish more environmentalists would be excited about engineering solving environmental ills and relied less on knee-jerk reactions.

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.

Probably OP is thinking of NIMBYs.

OP is thinking of people who bumper sticker "Believe Science" but never took science beyond grade school or a required "science for poets" class. People who think "chemicals are bad, but organic is good".

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.

That would be quite the strawman but whatever works for them.

> That would be quite the strawman but whatever works for them.

These types of people exist, and in worryingly large numbers.

See also the German 'Green' party whose policies have led to lots and lots more CO2 emissions over the years.

Also, Greenpeace energy selling organic gas. That’s is very funny until you realise that 1) they are serious, and 2) they vote.

Do you mean "renewable" gas? https://green-planet-energy.de/privatkunden/prowindgas

I can't find anything about "organic" gas, maybe your auto translate did a wrong thing?!

Sorry, it was vegan gas, not organic. They stopped labelling it that way, obviously, after being thoroughly ridiculed. It’s difficult to find references to it now, but some articles from that time (2020-2022 I think) remain, e.g. https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/decouple/greenpeace-sel...

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.

I get why people laught at it but let’s not forget anaerobic digestion reactors do produce methane from manure and last centuries oleoindustrie was using tons of cetacean fat, so vegan gaz is not litterally meaningless.

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.

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...

Yes, I was (partially) talking about sunsetting nuclear energy, which they had a major part in (though some of that was indirectly).

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.

> > See also the German 'Green' party whose policies have led to lots and lots more CO2 emissions over the years. reply

> 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.

They barely made it into parliament at all most elections, hovering around 5% in 2002 and 2006 and well below 10% after that until 2021. I think you might be giving them too much credit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_90/The_Greens#Electio...

> They barely made it into parliament at all most elections

You don't even have to be in parliament to influence other parties.

Do you have a specific connection between landfills and NIMBYs, or are you just generally interested in NIMBYs in the abstract?

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.

Search google news "environmentalist landfill" and find me one article praising the ingenuity of landfills

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...

Studies researching the negative effects of landfills are the necessary first step in making them environmentally friendly. How else would we know what to do?

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 think the search results are not representative of what actual humans think.

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.

Environmentalists in the US are against nuclear power, solar power, geothermal energy. They are against high-rise buildings and pro-golf-courses. They can be safely ignored since their stated goals and their actions can only be concordant if one assumes they're idiots or enemies.

Fiscal conservatives in the US are against raising taxes, decreasing military spending, or cutting social security. They can be safely ignored since their stated actions can only be concordant if one assumes they are idiots.

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.

Actually most that I know are all in that bucket. The trick is that this raises the deficits which they then get to blame on the next Democrat in office. It’s a fun party trick.

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.

The counter for that is that taxes change economic activity and so raising taxes doesn't bring in as much revenue as you would think because some activities are no longer worth doing (profitable) after paying higher taxes. (not to mention people looking for tax deductions).

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)

> 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.

> ...can only be concordant if one assumes they're idiots. It's unlikely they are...

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.

Fair. I've edited it.

Can you please point me to a single environmentalist who is against nuclear power, solar power, geothermal energy, and high-rise buildings but is for golf courses?

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 if they were a hive mind. See comments about how "HN" both believes in unrestricted capitalism and supports privacy regulations.

Sure. Cost and contact information for research contract is in my profile.

Donald Trump comes to mind

I'm not convinced Donald Trump believes anything at all, so I think he doesn't count.

(Not to mention that Trump tower would seem to exclude him from being against high rises.)

What, 3 out of 4 isn't good enough for you? The high rise part of the comment is an example of "one of these things is not like the others" in that of course people all about the money will like 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.

The Trump administration backed away from policies meant to reduce carbon emissions, and promoted policies meant to increase energy independence through increased reliance on and use of fossil fuels. The same administration also rolled back nearly 100 separate environmental regulations. It supported developing energy reserves on federally protected land, including national forests and near national monuments.

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.

I don't know what I read to get a totally opposite meaning of the original comment, but rereading it now does make this ID10T level of WTF

I mean there are definitely some misguided people who claim to believe just that, so I was trying to take you seriously :)

I modified my original comment to replace "people" with "environmentalist" in the first sentence to clarify what I meant—you probably read it before I did that. Sorry.

Just so we’re clear, you’re asserting that Donald Trump is an environmentalist?

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.

The average environmentalist I am familiar with is the exact opposite except for nuclear power.

The ones with the loudest voices have been against it for decades. Greenpeace for example.

Landfills certainly require more power to operate than that gas scheme can provide later.

It all sounds and reads like a fairytale but none of this is sustainable.

70k homes is about 84MW.

You’re gonna have a tough time finding any evidence that running a landfill requires 84MW of electricity.

A single truck requires more energy to operate in a year.

Are you confusing MW (power) with MWh (energy)? There's no way that a truck uses more energy, unless it's running 24/7 or something.

84 Megawatts = 112645.86 Horsepower

Fast and Furious 12: Too Trash Too Furious

According to [1] an electric garbage truck traveling 15,000 miles a year uses about 38,960 kWh. An 84 MW power plant produces 84,000 kWh every hour, or enough to power more than two trucks for an entire year. Even if we assume that the diesel equivalent uses a hundred times as much it's still a tiny fraction of what the plant in TFA produces.

[1] https://www.oregon.gov/deq/ghgp/Documents/ElectricGarbageTru...

Couple issues with that comparison: 15k seemed low given I drive ~10k a year and I don't work a job that uses my car, so I checked refuse trucks drive on average more like 25k miles per year and there are many servicing a single dump. Also most garbage trucks are still diesel so you've got to 5-10x that power usage number and there's all the vehicles used to compact and move the trash once it reaches the landfill which are also (currently) pretty exclusively diesel powered (think bulldozers and soil compactors with some excavators thrown in).

https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10309

The point is this is free energy - all of the energy sent to the trucks is going to be done either way.

So, you use more of that "enough energy to power them for an ear" that your power plant is outputting every hour.

There are plenty of hours in an year. You won't get any meaningful problem by complaining about the OP's approximations.

A single truck requires more energy to operate in a year than 70k homes do!? I find this extremely difficult to believe.

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#:~:....

you should note that a gas engine does not convert all that 33kWh of energy into mechanical energy. a gasoline engine has about a 25% conversion into mechanical energy. https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/atv.shtml . diesel might be a bit better than a car but it's city driving by nature.

just heat alone is the largest waste product in a car or truck

That's not relevant to the comparison in any way.

fair enough. misread your comment

Only Soviets kept using gas engined trucks and buses past the 50s

And, for some insane reason, the average American commuter.

A tank of gas is still a tank of gas, regardless of what it gets used for.

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

This has got to be one of the greatest retorts I have ever read on HN. Hat tip to you.

Most trucks -- at least of the kind used for transporting trash to a landfill -- don't burn any gasoline at all. They run on diesel fuel.

(But yeah, the original claim still seems orders-of-magnitude off; clearly BS.)

A 500 hp semi truck engine running at peak power is like 350 kw, so 84 megawatts (84,000 kw) is more than 200 of those engines at full throttle at all times.

I think their point was the delivery of that garbage over time is subject to entropy, and from first principles probably took more energy consumption than a sustained 84MW over the time period the landfill is a viable source for energy.

I know nothing about landfill engineering here, to be frank, simply being a grease for good online gearing.

The gas is generated by the chemistry of the stuff that was put there. Moving the stuff there takes a lot of energy, but everything sitting there mainly just needs a pump and treatment system.

This is besides the point because environmentalists (who were carped at above) tend to seek to reduce the amount of trash that needs to be shipped off to somewhere.

reducing trash is useful. Recycling of trash is sometimes worse than throwing it in a landfill. There are many different plastics and many different grades of used paper so there is no one size fits all. People often want to think I recycle so I'm good - but effort is needed to reduce packaging and things that break early.

This is my argument against recycling. It is not sustainable to recover a tiny amount of energy when balanced with the extra diesel-guzzling truck traversing the neighborhood. All so we can think we're "making a difference" by keeping plastic bottles out of a landfill.

Maybe someone should write a book about virtue signaling and it's dangers.

It would be difficult to promote such a book by word-of-mouth.

The real danger is allowing corporate mouthpieces to pollute our discourse with propaganda and outright lies.

I think people generally want to do what they feel is right. The problem lies in 1) the use of propaganda to force blanket solutions to what they pose as the problem and 2) not using evidence-based scientific methods.

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.

>extra diesel-guzzling truck

At least where I live, the garbage trucks have split compartments which means there's no additional trucks.

Still additional trucks as the truck cannot hold as much - one compartment will fill faster than the other.

Are you sure? The truck goes a couple of miles on 7 pounds of diesel, how much material is it able to recover in a couple of miles?

> It is not sustainable to recover a tiny amount of energy when balanced with the extra diesel-guzzling truck traversing the neighborhood.

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.

Exactly. Recycling shouldn't be implemented if it uses dirty energy. There should be accounting and accountability. Don't pretend an operation is green unless it really is.

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