Garbage In, Toxics Out(theintercept.com) |
Garbage In, Toxics Out(theintercept.com) |
Properly constructed and operated landfills are a small source of methane, but otherwise quite benign.
And plastic does not stay inert in landfills forever either, it slowly decomposes, releasing products into environment (methane and carbon dioxide being most benign of those). Effectively, you get slower, less controlled and more dangerous (biologically speaking) "burning" which will be done for many generations instead of burning the stuff right away in controlled conditions.
Because that tends to only happen in a few, what we consider, first world nations. A huge portion of the world does not have sanitary waste collection system, and therefore produces huge amounts of plastic waste that get into rivers and the ocean.
Of even in places with waste collection, an (un)healthy amount of plastics never make it to the trash. Blow off/run off from trash cans is one example. Another is direct environmental loss into the environment. For example washing your clothes releases massive amounts of plastics, unless you happen to buy only natural materials.
Plastic is both a wonder material, and a wonder mess. Using it in things like medical device sanitation is a net benefit for humankind, using it everywhere appears to have higher costs than expected.
I'm a little confused. Isn't pyrolysis what the company said they were doing?
Do they know what pyrolysis is, and are simply lying about doing it, or is pyrolysis a myth?
But there are different forms of pyrolysis. In my understanding, the company uses lower temperatures to transform plastic into "synthetic oil" (i.e. mix of hydrocarbons instead of long polymer chains), which in theory could be used to synthesize new plastic. Only small part of plastic gets transformed into gas and burned. But this "oil" is much harder to work with than oil pumped from ground, so instead of recycling it fully, some of it gets discarded into environment, resulting in toxic hazard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
As far as I can tell, the only real "disadvantages" if you can call them that, are:
1. more expensive than throwing the garbage in a big pile somewhere
2. need to clean it from time to time
3. not necessarily a profitable business
Other than that, it can handle just about anything that's not radioactive, can be designed to produce 0 toxic byproducts, and can run at or at least only slightly below energy neutral. Plasma gasifiers can also consume a huge amount of garbage for their size, so much so that the US Navy is starting to put them on the latest generation of aircraft carriers.
Not building out more gasifiers seems to me a failure of the free market. Because it's hard to make it profitable, no one is doing it - when really we should just be building one or two near every major city and funneling all our garbage there.
In theory, we could build out enough to start working through all the landfills too.
I realized this as well and have practically eliminated single-use plastics from my life except for those being those needed for health and safety reasons, like the blister packs that some medicines come in or bottles holding household chemicals.
Even with household chemicals, a strategy to minimize plastic use is to buy high-quality commercial applicators that can be reused for years and then purchase the product in bulk or concentrated form.
It isn't as easy as it should be, but at the same time it isn't difficult. It just requires time and effort.
When I discovered that bar shampoos and soaps that come in cardboard boxes contain the same ingredients as their liquid counterparts, and were less expensive because you weren't paying to transport water or mold a plastic bottle, it started a landslide of plastic avoidance.
Was this not a problem with the older model of separated recycling (glass, plastic, and paper in separate bins), with plastic limited to numbers 1 and 2 only?
I'm also curious about if plasma gasification is a better option for plastics than whatever this process is.
The oil to make the original plastics has already been extracted, so it would be a carbon-neutral solution for the most part, especially if some of the plastics are burned to drive the process.
THe ultimate solution, though, is to lessen our dependence on plastic (Reduce), and completely eliminate single-use (Reuse).
The legacy of GND is that it helped influence the Inflation Reduction Act so we sort of got to an extremely watered down version of what the original vision was.
It's just one example. I'm kind of bitter about the lack of attention to the effectiveness of the green tech movement and actually focusing on reduction of resource use.
And no doubt having the government pay private industry invites grifters.
I think a proper solution will necessarily involve going further left, i.e. government-employed workers. People who can't pocket the difference by cutting corners.
Many years ago there was a lot of press about a company call Changing World Technologies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changing_World_Technologies) that touted how they could use pyrolysis to convert any hydrocarbon feedstock into fuel (garbage, sewage, etc).
It was going to be cost competitive and clean. Turned out to be not so much when their pilot plant processing turkey remnants stank up the town and shut them down.
The technology seems to be valuable, but it looks like capturing and containing emmissions is still not cost effective so they just dump it.
A single 2200 acre landfill can handle 5 million metric tons per year for ~250 years. 80M metric tons isn’t a particularly big issue from an environmental or cost issue it’s all a question of collection and transportation to disposal sites not long term storage.