"Sweden burns nearly all its trash, much of it in lieu of recycling" is an equally true but very different sounding headline.
Halfway down, some controversy is mentioned:
> “Waste-to-energy prevents proper recycling and makes climate change worse.” Vahk is also skeptical about the plants’ safety. “Our recent report found high levels of persistent organic pollutants like dioxins or furans around waste incinerators in three countries.”
And Sweden imports trash to burn, raking in $100m/year in doing so.
I'm not at all against trash incineration, especially if they are capturing the energy, but there a many incentives (financial and feel-good) to paint it one way or another. It's simply a series of tradeoffs that we should be cognizant of.
I'm also not particularly against landfills, which are in a sense merely a form of carbon and pollutant sequestration. Not mentioned in the article is that many landfills also trap that methane gas and then burn it to do more or less the same energy reclamation process, and that this is potentially less energy intensive and less pollutant intensive, since they are not burning plastics etc. It would be nice if they had a comparison.
Trouble is proper [Plastic] recycling is expensive and rarely done - in UK governmnet pays by the ton for recycling, which mostly consists of companies that pay another poorer country to take our trash, where it is usually not properly disposed of, and it ends up burnt or in the ocean.
Internatuonal trash trade should really be illegal - it is fundamentally uncontrollable, full of fraud and corruption.
I would rather we manage the trash here imperfectly, wherether that's landfilling or burning. At here we can have a handle on it.
> Trouble is proper recycling is expensive and rarely done
Especially with plastics. There have been plenty of stories in the past year or two showing that it's basically all been a sham and that it just ends up in the trash.
Thx for the link. I keep hearing and reading such articles; I need help connecting the dots though - I literally know people who work as "sorters" in local "recyling plants". Is that makeshift work? Why are we sorting, what do the recycling plants do? If there is an intentional deception on such a pervasive low level scale, that's astonishing. At the same time if there's not, what is the operational model or output of the local "recycling plants"? Are they really just sorting places that are unaware all their nicely sorted stuff ends up in same place?
No, there are still other things that are worth recycling. Sorting would separate out aluminum, paper, glass, plastic in a single stream recycling. The recycled material all gets bundled up and tested for some purity (i.e. this giant block of aluminum cans we crushed together is 98% aluminum). It is kind of more the fact that for a the blocks of aluminum, glass and paper there are buyers that can actually use that recycled material (if it is of a high enough purity) but the market for recycled plastic is small so it is likely cheaper to just throw anything plastic (or has some plastic) back in to the garbage.
The purity of the recyclables has been a problem and there are companies (like AMP Robotics [0]) working on machine learning to better sort and re-sort recycled material to get it up to a purity that it is actually financially worth using and won't get abandoned and thrown in the trash.
Edit: Not to say that there isn't intentional deception as well. The most blatant example I have seen in some municipalities is a city that has a "recycling program" to make people feel good but the trash truck comes by and dumps both the trash bin and recycling bin in to the same truck.
You have to be careful with that last statement. Our truck does the same thing. Its a split body truck, and has separate compartments for garbage and recycling.
>If there is an intentional deception on such a pervasive low level scale, that's astonishing.
There is, by ourselves to ourselves. Everyone wants to save the planet, but no one wants to give up their detached single family houses, 2 cars, toys, and trips to Tahiti. Which is why there is no political support for the real solution to the problem - drastic increases in fossil fuel taxes to the point that consumption is drastically curbed.
>> but no one wants to give up their detached single family houses, 2 cars, toys, and trips to Tahiti.
Who has those things? I'd love to own two cars, one would be electric, but my apartment does not have parking available for two. Tahiti? When? I have a job. I have a cellphone. Those things don't go away. Vacations are for the rich and unemployed/retired. We normals spend our "vacation" days catching up on sleep.
(As I type this I realize that I had totally forgotten that is Friday. Weekends are for rich people. I'm going to be at work tomorrow, except for when I duck out to pick up an amazon package before it gets stolen from my apartment lobby. Amazon delivery drivers don't take weekends off either.)
The people that consistently vote and contribute to election campaigns have those things. And many people aspire to have those things, so removing all doubt that they will ever get them may also be an undesirable thought.
For decades there's been a 'climate change denier'-esque movement against recycling. They used to attack all recyling as government overreach, and claim it was a scam invented by the mafia and that it was bad for the planet and other things that now seem ridiculous.
Notice that even in that, he admits recycling of certain things is a sensible idea, but the bleading heart liberals have taken it too far.
As it became more standard globally they had to slowly shift their target as they retreated. Now they're down to complaining really loudly about how some subset of plastic recycling is all a big scam by evil corporations and using that to pivot to how environmentalist are all stupid and evil and communist and we should never listen to them. Regulating these evil corporations that are lying to us apparently isn't an option.
I hadn't read that in years, amazing to revisit it.
There's a paragraph about how expensive recycling is, which is all sourced from "Keep America Beautiful" the green washing group that are the people cited in the recent "corporate America invented recycling to fool you" stories. That organization was set up originally to stop governments introducing 5 cent returns on bottles in the 1950s, which the corporations didn't want, so instead they said it was all the public's fault. The very next paragraph in the article attacks these return schemes as even worse than recycling.
> He says what he saw was an industry that didn't want recycling to work. Because if the job is to sell as much oil as you possibly can, any amount of recycled plastic is competition.
Key quote, which nails the key question. Does recycling not work or was it intentionally and turned into a culture war topic in America, while many other nations just got on with it.
And now the same industry, is using their own shady moves in the 70s, to undermine and stall further regulation.
This is like quoting fossil fuel industry internal documents about how renewables can never work, and their ads pretending they were going green, to undermine renewables as a scam.
why do you assume recycling works? If it has never worked (for plastic)? The devil may not be pretending to recycle, but pretending that it could ever work. Pretending recycling works is also to the benefit of commerce to never have to "degrow" or "turn off the tap".
If they genuinely cared about recycling, containers and bottles would all have standard shapes and sizes. That is not a thing afaik.
This is only true if no fossil fuels are being burnt.
It is getting truer, as the grid becomes greener, which both a) means less fossil fuels are being burnt and b) any energy used for recycling is less carbon intensive, but anyone telling you it was best to bury plastic for the last couple of decades likely was politically connected to the people who sell the raw input for making current plastics, fossil fuels.
I often think about 'How did this work before cheap plastic was avaliable" and often I don;t know the answer. Like supermarkets with pre-packaged food are literally impossible without plastic
In Poland, there are many criminal groups which form companies and take waste (usual toxic, sometimes regular municipal) from Western clients and bury them into the ground or just dump on some rented lot. There are hundreds of such cases now.
Government is finding these lots full of dangerous chemicals and has to spend taxpayer money to properly dispose of them (it can be as high as 20 milion EU per lot).
Apparently it has started a couple years ago when China banned importing EU waste.
I wish every journalist writing about complex environmental topics would just start every first draft with that sentence, and then evolve it into an article.
I've really become exhausted at the first world default assumption that something is wrong if it's not a win-win situation. Is that not a part of the psychology of many who can't accept things like nuclear and natural gas as alternatives to arguably worse solutions because there are those tradeoffs? I agree that it would be great if journalists could move from win-win thinking to tradeoffs thinking, and that's a transition that globalized societies should move towards as well.
Another phrase for this concept is "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," something a lot of people struggle (or outright refuse) to understand.
Yep. Self-driving cars are a great example. They will solve every transportation-related problem a modern city has! Cue the horrible dystopian animation of an intersection without traffic lights. Sorry to be a Luddite buzzkill, but what I do if I live near one and want to walk?
All you would need for that is the traditional "Walk/Don't Walk" sign. Sensors will detect when you are at the intersection, and coordinate with all the autonomous vehicles to stop so you can walk. After they have all stopped, the Walk sign will light. No need for traffic lights. That is an easily solvable problem.
Respectfully. If they were true journalist they would do this. Unfortunately, we too often get hacks posing as journalists.
We, The Public, need to stop giving credit where credit is not due.
Put another way, if your pet barked would you call it a cat? Of course not, yet we allow hacks to pass themselves off as journalists. Such language abuse is Orwellian, at best.
I am all against trash incineration. The bulk of it is hydrocarbons (plastics/paper etc). Burning means turning solid or liquid carbon into gaseous CO2. Imho a kilo of carbon buried in a landfill is less damaging than a kilo of it floating around the atmosphere.
I've started to see a degree of synergy in landfills. Carbon is extracted from the ground in solid or liquid forms (mined coal/oil). Burning it into CO2 causes climate change. But landfills bury carbon back in the ground from whence it came, at least out of the atmosphere. Turning trash into invisible CO2 might look good but is doesn't help the climate. We might not like the sight of trash piles but we need to have a serious talk about whether burying is actually worse than releasing yet more carbon into the atmosphere. Nothing ever really goes away.
What you say is true, but the alternative used by neighboring countries right now is that the garbage is buried in the ground while gas, oil and coal are produced or imported and burned in the place of trash.
Only if you're only looking at it from a co2 emissions perspective. If you consider other forms of air pollution and the sibling comment is correct[1], burning garbage is probably worse than burning coal. It's definitely worse than a natural gas power plant.
Now is not the time to burn trash. If you get carbon capture, we are better applying it to natural gas first (AKA, right now), and only extend it to trash once global warming is more under control.
I'm also skeptic about the rarer pollutants. How much mercury and lead are they throwing at the environment? (Surely, it's controlled, but how well is it controlled?) What else is on that trash? (That certainly isn't controlled.)
Proper trash recycling will probably use a burning stage once we get it. And I'm all for experiments on it. But I really don't think we currently have the tech to do it right, and the CO2 problem is a huge one right now.
Just skip the burning step. Get electricity from sun/wind/nuclear and "sequester" the trash. New branding for landfills: "Early-cycle carbon sequestration and storage facilities". They could sell carbon credits for every ton of carbon they inter in their below-ground solid carbon storage facilities.
Maybe? Even clean plastic degrades eventually (although I don't have a sense of how the timelines compare with modern carbon sequestration approaches), and much of the waste is probably things that decompose into methane and/or CO2 much faster. Meanwhile, you're not going to get much solar power at the times of year when Sweden probably most needs energy generation.
The point is very well taken from other comments, though, that pollutants other than CO2 are probably also a significant concern even if CCS is, in isolation, up to the task.
This is a only because we make things out of fossil fuel. When we stop doing that burning garbage will not be a problem.
Keep in mind that the burning often replace other forms of burning to generate power/heat. Until all power/heat generation is clean this will not matter.
For any country that has a coal or gas plant this will not increase emissions but will make dealing with hazardous material easier.
Incinerators can emit 2.5 times more greenhouse gasses than coal-fired plants, according to a 2021 Earthjustice report. They emit up to 18 times more lead and 14 times more mercury, along with elevated levels of other harmful emissions, it said. ref: https://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/2022/04/01/burning...
I'm with you in that I'm not unilaterally condemning one method but it'd be helpful to have some progress-based comparisons. eg: Compared to burying, burning reduces % of methane emissions. Outputs of these toxins increases by %, primarily affecting a region of sq mi. Overall, burning [effects] CO2 by %.
I generally agree with all the points in that report, but note they are talking about US plants, located in minority areas, that regularly fail to meet the US standards for air quality, and don't seem particularly motivated to do so for whatever reason.
You can have crappy, low-tech, poorly-regulated coal plants / landfills / trash incinerators etc. that do worse than the average of examples of the same tech.
Proper landfill management includes capturing and burning that gas, that gets trapped there and is toxic if you let the pressure build up enough for it to escape.
How does one deal with ground water pollution when just leaving trash in the ground? It must be much easier to clean pollutants like heavy metals from gases , than it is to clean whatever the rain dissolves out from under a landfill? Being Swedish, the idea of leaving trash in a hole at all feels strange. But then I'm assuming incineration is reasonably "clean" in the sense that pollutants can be filtered.
Being completely ignorant of the process, I don't understand how burning would possibly make it better. Let's say that you perfectly filter/capture bad stuff (and I'm extremely skeptical of both our ability to do it, and industry claims of our ability to do it). What do you do with it then... other than, put it in the ground / find some way to store it, and now we're back where we started?
I think a lot of us have this childhood mental image that "burning makes stuff go away". But it doesn't!
If you can capture and things like heavy metals or toxins, it's obviously going to be tiny amounts. Or - the amounts are the same but having a kg of cadmium in a jar is obviously easier to handle than a kg of cadmium dissolved in 20 tons of water.
Incineration replaces a large problem with a smaller one. Instead of having large amounts of bulk garbage, you get a smaller amount of hazardous waste. You need a much smaller landfill. You can also choose a location that minimizes the environmental impact, even if it's much farther away, because you don't have to worry so much about logistics.
But we all agree it doesn't disappear, right? Instead of large problem on the ground, I now have large problem in the air and small one on the ground.
What are the things that are easier to handle in the air than on the ground?
I feel either I am having a complete and utter intuitive misunderstanding of conservation of mass and stuff, or everybody else is :-D. I feel we are replacing stuff I can touch and move and cover and isolate and manage, with stuff that I now breathe in forever and lands in the water and on plants and people in a completely uncontrolled fashion. It did not magically go away somewhere, right? :-O
> And Sweden imports trash to burn, raking in $100m/year in doing so.
Which is basically nothing. Sweden's annual expenditure is $100 billion, meaning this covers 0.1% of their expenses. That's the equivalent of a person on 50k getting $50 as some offm
Agreed with all of the rest of your points though!
Yeah I'm a little skeptical of the "we make less of this ... because we make a whole lot of that" kinda trades. Not that it can't be a good trade, but for me "less landfill" is not the biggest fight I'd want to fight ...
One should remember that the comparison shouldn't necessarily be between burning trash and digging it down, so long as anything else would be burned instead of the trash, for energy. And that's (unfortunately) still the case at least some parts of the year for Sweden, i.e. that the renewable and nuclear doesn't completely cover the electricity/heating needs.
So the comparison in that situation is between on the one hand to burn trash, and on the other hand putting thash in a landfill and then burning fossil fuels.
Where do all the nasty fluorocarbons end up? As far as I can tell, the answer is that they're simply emitted out the smokestack and into the environment.
That is a big family of chemical compounds, so it is not easy to give an easy answer.
I think that you are referring to a specific subset, fluoropolymers, also called "forever chemicals", like PTFE/Teflon/Goretex. They do not release in the air the most studied PFAS (like PFOA) under controlled condition, but more studies are needed to see if the same happens in commercially run incinerators.
What is the alternative? Landfill. PFAS are more concentrated in landfills, which accept non-incinerated ashes/waste.
What seems to be a valid general guideline for incineration? The higher the temperature, the better.
I found a nice report if you are interested: "Disposal of products and materials containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS): A cyclical problem"
Please define "extremely rare". They're found in many products including dental floss, clothing, furniture, carpets, pizza boxes, fishing line, and only-God-knows-what-else.
It's certainly small as a mass fraction of household waste, let's say 0.01%. According to the article, European waste-to-energy plants burn 96 million tons of trash annually. So that's 9600 tons annually of fluorocarbon pollution, which will build up cumulatively in the environment because it effectively never breaks down.
Halfway down, some controversy is mentioned:
> “Waste-to-energy prevents proper recycling and makes climate change worse.” Vahk is also skeptical about the plants’ safety. “Our recent report found high levels of persistent organic pollutants like dioxins or furans around waste incinerators in three countries.”
And Sweden imports trash to burn, raking in $100m/year in doing so.
I'm not at all against trash incineration, especially if they are capturing the energy, but there a many incentives (financial and feel-good) to paint it one way or another. It's simply a series of tradeoffs that we should be cognizant of.
I'm also not particularly against landfills, which are in a sense merely a form of carbon and pollutant sequestration. Not mentioned in the article is that many landfills also trap that methane gas and then burn it to do more or less the same energy reclamation process, and that this is potentially less energy intensive and less pollutant intensive, since they are not burning plastics etc. It would be nice if they had a comparison.
Tradeoffs everywhere.