You’d have a lot less to bury if you burned it first, right?
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We breathe the air. Putting all the world’s garbage into the air is a bad idea.
Especially now that people are finally starting to care about climate change/global warming, which is directly caused by human-created CO2 in the air. Burning anything organic makes CO2. Burning all the garbage would cause a HUGE increase in CO2 emissions, offsetting everything everyone is doing to reduce our current emissions and substantially accelerating an already-awful situation.
Some trash is an absolute disaster to burn…electric waste for instance is a massive health risk.
Other times landfill is cheaper and we kinda expect “someone” to recycle it
We have a very out of sight out of mind mentality with our trash
It isn’t even necissarily done for climate protection.. it is simply cheaper to landfill something and also companies are very aware of burning certain trash causing straight up chemical disasters..so they will prefer the landfill
Companies will choose the cheaper option especially if the more expensive option of burning trash likely comes with endless lawsuits of having caused chemical and ecological disasters way worse than the out of sight out of mind approach the landfill gets u
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Burning it would release countless toxins into the air. Too much to effectively filter out, and even if we could, we’d still need a way to safely store toxic particles.
The US military did something like what you’re proposing. It’s called a burn pit. A part of a military base where they just burned all their waste. Several severe chronic illnesses have since been connected to the burn pits, including several forms of cancer.
Even with filtration systems, burning the waste of an entire country, let alone the entire world, would ruin us with pollution.
[UK plastics sent for recycling in Turkey dumped and burned, Greenpeace finds](https://archive.is/2021.05.17-081401/https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/17/uk-plastics-sent-for-recycling-in-turkey-dumped-and-burned-greenpeace-finds)
Bit of a rabbit hole once you look at countries being paid to take another country’s waste.
Edit typos.
Where land is available, landfills are cheaper to operate. Landfills do not actually take up much land. There is some misconception that land fills are some vast areas of land filled with rubbish. In fact, land fills usually take up, at most, a very small percentage of total land use.
For the US, for example, it is estimated that landfills take up 2,000,000 acres in total. Sounds like a lot until it is put into perspective that the US land area is 2,400,000,000 acres. Landfills consists, therefore, of less than 0.1% of the total land available.
Burning trash cannot be done using a simple fire. The furnace has to be at 2,000 degrees F or so to minimize the formation of toxic fumes. This, of course, requires a fair amount of energy and capital. Of course, it is also possible to recover some of that heat to heat water or produce electricity. Nonetheless, incinerators tend to be expensive to run.
So it is a tradeoff. For certain municipalities an incinerator makes sense, in others they don’t.
In many countries, e.g., Germany, landfills have been completely replaced by incineration plants, already decades ago.
All non-recyclable trash (except for certain kinds of hazardous waste) is burned. This is done at very high temperature to ensure that, e.g., the toxic intermediates from burning plastics are further broken down and rendered harmless.
The heat is used to generate electricity.
Looking at the prior answers, they are all based on a US model. Here in Europe, they have been doing it since the 1970s. Even back then, the refuge was pre-sorted before being burned to remove toxic waste that can harm the environment. Filters were heavily researched from the 1950s for the Nuclear power industry. The innovations from that industry were taken for the fledgling incinerator building in later decades. The filters catch emissions from the incineration process, burning only the items that cannot be recycled or will not be turned into compost. The rules to prevent pollution are strict and covered by EU law, Waste Incineration Directive 2000/76/EC.
If I use the example of my home city in Coventry, UK. It built its incinerator in the 1970s, and during its construction, pipelines were laid to the schools, hospitals, factories and council buildings in the city centre. These pipelines take heat to provide a source of free heating in the winter. In the 1990s, they retrofitted the burners into boilers and included water heating, power generation and water purification plant for the local river. The waste, once burnt, provides five different forms of energy recovery to maximise the benefit from it. Before incineration, the items are sorted by machine and then by hand to ensure all waste is thoroughly upcycled, recycled and toxic elements removed for treatment. The side processes are;
1. Area heating.
2. Electricity generation.
3. Water purification of the river that passes the plant.
4. Water heating for the city’s municipal swimming pools.
5. Ash (once all toxins are removed) for farmers to spread on their fields as part of the fertilisation process.
It only takes the will and foresight (plus money) to turn something highly wasteful to be ‘buried’ rather than finding forms to recover the energy in the product.
Who is “we”? The Swiss for example burn all of their non-recyclable waste, landfill was outlawed in 2000.
https://www.bafu.admin.ch/bafu/en/home/themen/thema-abfall/abfall–daten–indikatoren-und-karten/abfall–indikatoren/indikator-abfall.pt.html/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaW5kaWthdG9yZW4uYWRtaW4uY2gvUHVibG/ljL0FlbURldGFpbD9pbmQ9QUIwMDcmbG5nPWVuJlN1Ymo9Tg%3d%3d.html
I wish we could have the ol’ backyard incinerators again but there’s so much foam and plastic and non-bio waste today vs what was trash in the 60’s, we’d end up with higher health risks from carcinogen exposure unfortunately.
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