Really curious as I know part of the problem may be pollution, but if certain parts of trash were burnable and safe, would that be a viable waste disposal option, somehow? Thanks in advance.
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Going to just throw out there that you don’t need a volcano to burn your trash. A good chunk of waste in the US is burnt. The added bonus is that that heat can be captured for electricity generation.
There are a lot of things you really don’t want to burn, though.
Because then they’d have a pyre of burning trash belching toxic gasses and soot in addition to an active volcano.
Volcanoes are also not giant pipes full of pools of lava, at least not for the most part. You’d need to find an ERUPTING volcano, lift millions of tons of trash into it somehow, and then watching as it was like an incineration facility, but without the electricity generation, and a 1000000x the pollution.
Burning something doesn’t make it go away, it just turns it into cancer and spreads it around.
Many countries already incinerate their trash without the use of a volcano in a much more controlled, and cost effective manner, with a lot less risk. As a bonus, we get energy out of it that can then be used for other things.
Also, here’s a video which shows what can happen when you throw things in to a volcano:
That’s what happens when a rock is thrown into a volcano from a height
byu/Visual_Lion_9655 ininterestingasfuck
A multitude of reasons:
(1) Despite the popular conception, the vast majority of volcanoes do not have an open pit of bubbling lava at the top. After active eruptions, everything solidifies and is plugged up until the next time. Lava lakes which persist are *incredibly* rare, there’s between 5 and 8 in the world I think, depending on how you count them. Absolutely not enough to be meaningful for waste disposal though.
(2) lava is molten rock, so it is still incredibly dense. Most stuff thrown onto it will stay on top of it, or will not sink down in any meaningful way. Volcanic vents are where stuff is *coming out* of the Earth, it doesn’t make for a good pathway in.
(3) heating and burning stuff in this manner does not lead to good things. Waste incineration plants have to do so in controlled ways with proper ventilation, it would be an environmental distaster at some uncontrolled open air pit. [Here is some campsite waste being disposed into the lava lake at Erta Ale for a small scale example.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq7DDk8eLs8&spfreload=10) Some possible further examples of interest in r/ThrowItIntoLava
(4) it’s incredibly inconvenient to transport any amount of waste to such a place. Volcanoes are always remote to some extent — even those next to settlements are difficult to reach the summit of. It would certainly make for an expensive and unsustainable environment to build any transport infrastructure on for the purpose.
The lava lake that exists closest to any settlement would be the one at the summit of Mt Nyiragongo, just north of Goma Town in DRC. It is widely held to be one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world due to the unpredictability of both its eruption timing *and* the nature of its lava. It’s 1977 eruption featured flows travelling at nearly 40 mph which overwhelmed some local villages.
Years ago they dropped nuclear waste in subduction zones, even THAT was protested, do you not think that dropping waste into a volcano would be? Now you CAN use very high temperatures to deal with waste, Plasma Waste Destruction works on this principle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
Theres a video of this around. Someone tosses a bag of trash into a volcano and it starts a mini eruption.
As others have said, volcanoes don’t just have an open top full of lava. If you toss something into the lava it’s going to sit on top and burn. If there’s water all of that will almost immediately turn to steam and essentially explode. Now you have hot, burning garbage flying everywhere as well as hot molten rock.
Burning trash can actually produce power, so burning it in a volcano would be a plain waste of energy.
The reason we typically don’t burn trash is because it generates extreme levels of pollution, much higher and more toxic than burning coal, so nobody is ok with that.
Ok, so here in Honolulu, we do have an active volcano with an open lava pit on a nearby island and we do burn our trash to get rid of it, but the two things are completely unrelated.
For one thing, a lot of people genuinely believe the volcano to be the home of Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire. A much, much larger group of people don’t believe that Pele is a real deity, but that the cultural concept of her is still sacred. So, if you started backing trash trucks up to Kilauea, you’d have a literal insurrection on your hands. Even I, a devout Christian, would be appalled by the idea.
All of the domestic trash on the whole island of O’ahu gets sent to the [H-Power facility](https://www.covanta.com/where-we-are/our-facilities/honolulu]). Iron/ steel is pulled out with magnets ahead of time for recycling. That’s why we don’t put food cans in our recycling bins. The plant doesn’t just burn it. It uses a plasma arc furnace to get it up to 2000F. Other metals are extracted from the ash and recycled. The trash get’s reduced in volume by 90% and then the ashes go to a landfill. The exhaust is 99.9% water vapor, nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.
This also is a net positive electricity generator. In fact, because plastic burns so well, the plant buys masses of lost fishing nets and lines that fisherman sometimes catch unintentionally. If a boat has a bad day, it can sometimes make more money selling garbage than fish. This is also why I personally don’t return my plastic bottles to get the recycling deposit back. Environmentally, it makes much more sense to send them off to get turned into electricity. When we recycle them, the get baled up and shipped to a plant in Alabama. That’s some of the worst greenwashing I can think of. The plant accounts for 5-15% of our total power generation for a population of just under a million people.
1: not very many volcanoes erupting that are safe enough to approach that close to the actual active part of the eruption. You need a super gentle and nice eruption like Iceland’s volcanoes on the peninsula or Kilauea. There’s very few of those, and I think the only one that’s currently actively erupting is the one in Antarctica.
2: there’s superheated toxic gases belching out of those volcanoes, so it’s hazardous to get too close anyway and they tend to throw stuff out instead of in. They only really collapse inward when they drain out the magma chamber just like the collapse of the caldera at Kilauea a few years ago.
Because burning it doesn’t make it disappear it just transforms it into gases and a lot of those would be toxic, that’s the main reason we don’t just incinerate trash all the time
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