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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Because burning it is worse than burying it in a lot of cases.
* Not all the waste is flammable, or not readily so. You’d have to build incinerators and use (typically) fossil fuels to power them. That requires more fuel, and produces more greenhouse gases that might otherwise be sequestered if, as is typical, we bury the waste once it reaches a certain level.
* There’re a LOT of types of trash (especially plastics or anything with heavy metals in it) that produce some pretty nasty toxic byproducts when they’re burnt. “Never have to deal with it again” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, because all you’re really doing is distributing that crap into the environment.
I mean, sure you can build scrubbers to make the emissions clean*er*, but you never get it all, and the scrubbers are technical and expensive to build/maintain, they don’t typically help with CO2 emissions, and regulating that stuff adds more layers of bureaucracy.
That doesn’t stop us. Trash *is* incinerated in some places. And the results are about as described above.
Go to any third world country and you’ll see the burning piles of trash and plastic. Hell, go 20 mins outside of southern US cities and you’ll see the rednecks do it too.
PS. Pls don’t.
The trick is pretty much to burn the trash INSTEAD of putting it in a landfill. So that the landfill doesn’t expand any. Because incinerating trash from a landfill is quite a hassle for a handful of reasons.
The idea that you can incinerate trash and use the heat as a source of energy is used in a lot of cities for city-wide central heating systems. But for hilarious reasons, the hot water for several hundred thousand citizens is considered a byproduct; it’s often the stem-powered electrical generator that is the REAL money making machine in the system.
But it also comes with the problem that if you want it to be financially sound to incinerate trash, you also need to have a need of the heat and electricity nearby. And this is one of the reasons why landfills are more popular in warmer climates; no-one has started to look at the landfill (problematic or not) as a free source of fuel, yet.
Incinerators that burn trash also constantly deal with the problem that they have very little control over the chemical composition of their fuel; it’s quite difficult to get an automated combustion process where the temperature is constantly optimal for the desired catalyst cleansing on the chimney. Most of them control the combustion process with…petrol. Or diesel. An oil derivate of some kind, anyway.
But that is kind of how trash incinerators have become tolerated; they provide electricity that is sought after and heat as a nice by-product. And to do it, they steal trash away from the hideously ugly idea that the landfills are.
The simple truth is that incinerators are not exactly awesome. But in comparison to a landfill, it’s actually a pretty good idea anyway.
This is fundamentally an economic and political problem, not an existential problem. This is combined with news fearmongering and misinformation.
Let me start by saying, garbage IS a problem. Overconsumption and waste IS real, and we should stop.
But popular depictions are wrong. For example, the great Pacific garbage patch isn’t a floating island of trash. It’s an area with more fingernail sized pieces of plastic float that usual. Note that this is actually WORSE because you’re more likely to eat this microplastic and have it cause disease than if it was a giant lump.
Overflowing landfills are a LOCAL problem, because local communities just don’t want to build landfills. They’d rather build more homes and shopping centers than landfills. They CHOOSE not to build landfills, not because they physically cant (at least in continental US). Modern landfills aren’t perfect, but they’re pretty good. But they are expensive, stinky, and no one wants one in their backyard.
Properly maintained, they’re perfectly safe and you can put kids playgrounds on on top of a full one just fine.
Notice the Properly, local politicians see that word to mean “$”. So they contract that out to the lowest bidder and are shocked Pikachu face when private companies cut corners.
Burning trash converts physical waste, into air pollution. This is CO2 and pollution you breathe in, instead of burying it.
Back to the ocean plastic waste, you might see the rivers in Brasil clogged with trash. This is because the local government doesn’t have the money to handle it properly, and locals dump it in the river because that’s the least bad solution.
Locals dump garbage into the river, it flows to the coast, and MrBeast picks it up for YouTube clicks.
The proper solution is to fund the local government to have garbage trucks to pick it up at the source and dump it in a LANDFILL before it goes into the river.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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