I see these articles about landfills overflowing and waste being improperly dumped in our oceans. Why can’t we just burn all of the garbage and never have to deal with it again?
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Burning it all is arguably much worse than having landfills. Burning random garbage will generate an assortment of toxic gases, and also a large amount of CO2.
Now some garbage is actually burnt in incineration plants, but those have filters and such to stop the worst of the resulting gases from getting into the atmosphere.
Short answer – we *kind of can*. Plastic for example is just solid oil, and ounce for ounce burning plastic gives you the same amount of energy as burning oil. We do have powerplants that can generate electricity, or at least hot water, by burning trash.
The biggest problem is trash has all sorts of stuff you don’t want to burn. All sorts of nasty chemicals and materials go into the waste stream that it’s best to bury in a safe manner, burning them just makes nasty chemicals airborne where they can pollute the air or water supplies.
Because you don’t want to release the noxious fumes and gaseous byproducts into the atmosphere. Granted, landfills do already tend to produce a lot of methane and carbon dioxide as things break down. But if you were to burn the contents of a landfill, you’d risk putting even more noxious and dangerous chemicals and gasses into the atmosphere as different things burn and give off different byproducts.
Edit: I’m speaking more about why we haven’t. But we actually *can* with the infrastructure for it. I lived in Germany for a few years and the city I lived in actually burned waste trash for energy in a waste-to-energy facility. And in these facilities, they do filter and screen as much heavy pollutants from the escaping gases to reduce the impact on the atmosphere.
I actually really loved that because I knew if I was ever unsure about how to recycle something, I’d just put it into the waste trash and knew it would be incinerated for energy production. In Europe, this is more common, but not on the scale necessary to produce a significant amount of power. And in the US, this is much less common.
Toxic emissions. There are parts of the world where it is done safely. Where i live we have a waste to energy plant creating electricity from burned garbage. Epa restrictions held it up for quite some time but once the hurdles were cleared it went on line. Been working for 30 ish years now. The caveat is that some things cannot be burned (construction debris mostly) and landfills are still necessary.
We can, but it’s currently too expensive.
This is currently done in Singapore.
The exhaust from the incinerators is very nasty and requires extensive scrubbing before it can be released into the atmosphere. This part of the process is very expensive and cost prohibitive for most of the world.
Burning doesn’t make things magically go away, the matter is still there and depending on what you burn you could be dumping a ton of material you don’t want floating around into the atmosphere to settle back down later.
You can burn certain kinds of trash and even use that for power the same way you would burn coal or gas or whatever, it’s not ideal any more than fossil fuels are but that’s not as immediately toxic as burning a lot of things can be.
The problem is sorting out that stuff from the stuff you really do NOT want to burn. It takes a lot of work and makes it more expensive than just burning fossil fuels so people will only choose that route with expensive subsidy programs to offset the increased cost.
Even once you do that, there will still be a lot of trash left to deal with.
In the small scale it is fine. In a large scale, think of major city, the contamination would devastate the environment. Agriculture, and Wildlife would be crippled. Humans would suffer not too long after.
As others have mentioned burning garbage releases a lot of toxic fumes and such.
But even if we somehow cleaned that up (which while likely possible is to expensive to bother doing) we are going to be releasing green house gases of some sort. The thing is just because you burn the garbage doesn’t mean the garbage stops existing. It’s just in the atmosphere. And burning stuff and putting in the atmosphere has been shown to be *really bad* so it’s probably not a good idea to burn even more stuff. Some quick googling and it looks like burning all of our away would result in about 10% increase in our CO2 emissions.
Now you might ask “can’t we just capture that?” Billions of dollars in research has tried and failed to figure out how to capture CO2 efficiently. So no, and if we could that’s back to square one of the problem of having to store a bunch of stuff anyway.
All that does is transform land pollution into air pollution, and it is MUCH cheaper and easier to manage land pollution than air pollution. You aren’t solving the problem, you are making it harder to manage.
Also landfills are eventually turned back into usable land. You are not ruining anything by creating one as long as it is created safely (lines to protect against contamination of local groundwater, for example)
We do burn trash at least here in the US I know because I work in several different trash burning plants they generate electricity with it. They burn millions of tons of garbage this way it reduces the waste by 75% the rest is ash, the ash does contain lead arsenic and hexavalent chrome. Also it’s caustic when wet. Hope this helps
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