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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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.
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