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?
In: 2
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.
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