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 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.
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