We have been fed pictures of massive mounds of garbage in landfills to encourage segregating our trash for recycling. However, this article argues that neither is recycling a necessarily viable solution nor are landfills all that bad.
“The case against landfill has two parts. The first part is that there are efficient, cheap, or environmentally friendly ways to practically reuse or recycle materials, rather than landfilling, meaning that there is a reasonable alternative. The second is that landfill itself is unsustainable, or environmentally unfriendly, meaning that we need an alternative. Both are false.”
First, the costs of producing ‘environment friendly’ recyclable and durable materials, especially energy and labour, don’t stack up:
“Producing tiny slivers of plastic uses almost no energy. Making the polyethylene resin for a single thin plastic bag, then blowing and sealing it, uses something like 0.6 megajoules, roughly the same energy as boiling a kettle of water. By contrast, cotton is extremely energy intensive, partly because cotton bags need to be much thicker to work, and weigh around 200 grams as compared to eight grams for polyethylene. Instead of a simple blowing and sealing process, the cotton must be made into yarn, woven into fabric, prepared, dried, sized, dyed, and finished, which takes around 17.5 megajoules, around 29 times as much energy.
In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic. Denmark’s equivalent public body estimated a similar ratio.
…The same pattern shows up almost everywhere we have tried to replace disposable goods with durable ones. Steel is more energy intensive than plastic, and a steel straw requires 10 grams of steel, compared to just 0.2 grams of plastic for a plastic straw. So even if the steel is never washed (hot water is also energy intensive), it would take 150 reuses for a steel straw to use fewer resources than a plastic one. And who would go without washing it?
A ceramic mug only beats a polystyrene cup on energy use after 1,000 uses, and even then only if your dishwasher is fairly efficient. Run a less efficient one and the disposable cup wins on energy forever.”
Recycling might make sense only when there is scarcity of the underlying material: “Batteries and electronics contain metals like copper, cobalt, lithium, and nickel. While we are not about to run out of any of these materials globally in a strict sense, their supplies are limited in practical terms. Plenty of copper ore remains in the ground, but it is getting harder and more expensive to extract as the highest quality and most accessible deposits have been depleted. In the case of cobalt, lithium, and nickel, production is geographically concentrated, meaning countries without natural supplies of their own have an interest in recycling in order to limit their dependence on imports. All of these, especially copper and nickel, are highly recyclable, with little loss of quality over multiple reuses. For these, recycling is sensible.”
Recycling itself has costs. Despite several educational initiatives, proper segregation of waste is limited resulting in significant labour costs: “Recycling is a straightforward process conceptually: collect waste, reprocess it, and turn it back into useful material. That picture breaks down once you look at what happens to waste after collection. Much of what is sent for recycling is never recycled. About 25 percent of items placed in American recycling bins are contaminants: for example, lids on containers, food, or damp paper. The number may be even higher, as the vast majority of US states do not consistently track contamination data. This can make the process energy or labor intensive and therefore expensive.”
We have also seen tragic pictures of massive piles of garbage floating in the ocean. The authors argue that none of that comes from the west and most of it is from a few countries who badly manage prevention of waste into waterways: “Richer countries have near-universal refuse collection and almost none of their waste winds up in the ocean. In low-income countries, however, over 90 percent of waste is improperly managed, and typically ends up dumped, burned, or escaping into waterways. Plastic flows into the ocean overwhelmingly come from a small handful of rapidly growing Asian economies. Approximately a hundred rivers, mostly in South and South-East Asia, account for half of ocean plastic. And a substantial share of plastic in the ocean isn’t domestic waste at all, but rather discarded fishing gear.”
On the other hand, landfills if managed well are not as bad as they are made out to be: “Engineers build modern landfills on thick layers of clay and tough plastic liners that contain the contaminated liquid that forms when rainwater filters through decomposing waste.
Operators place waste in thin layers, compact it tightly, and cover it regularly to control smells, litter, pests, and fire risk. As food and garden waste break down, gas wells pull methane out of the landfill body and route it to flares or generators instead of letting it escape into the air. This typically captures around 75 percent of the methane produced, and sometimes as much as 95 percent. Drainage layers and pipes collect contaminated liquid and send it for treatment, while operators monitor the surrounding ground and water, both throughout the site’s life and long after it closes. Regulators shut down badly run landfills.”
In conclusion: “Instead of paying more to recycle, we could spend that money far more effectively on other environmental mitigation measures like carbon capture. The main exception is metal recycling, which should likely be the primary or even exclusive focus of municipal recycling programs. Inasmuch as some landfill sites fall short of best practices, as some surely still do, improving monitoring and imposing penalties on sloppy operators is likely to pack a much bigger environmental benefit, at lower cost, than trying to divert more materials from landfill to recycling.
And while modern landfill is ideal, worse-run landfill is still an upgrade in regions where the alternative is open waste dumping or burning. It reduces human contact with waste and localizes pollution to one managed site instead of many unmanaged ones.
There is a great humanitarian and environmental case for improving waste disposal systems in developing countries. But focusing effort on expensive recycling means getting less bang for our buck. Recycling is complex to sustain: it requires the successful coordination of collection, separation, contamination control, and reliable buyers for the material. If even one part of the chain breaks down, it doesn’t work. By contrast, landfill is simple and cheap. Investing in landfill, even suboptimal landfills, protects more local rivers, forests, lakes, and seas.”
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