What Happens To Plastic Waste – What’s worse: burning plastic trash or leaving it in a landfill? In particular, I’m thinking about plastic packaging that isn’t easily recyclable – are its components perhaps more easily dispersed as gases rather than slowly leaching into a landfill?
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What Happens To Plastic Waste
As anyone who’s ever witnessed an errant toss a water bottle or crumpled packaging into a campfire can attest, burning plastic is nasty business. It stinks; emits flames of an unusual color; and the smoke makes you want to reach for the nearest gas mask. I distinctly remember one such instance in particular, in high school, when a perfectly lovely bonfire on the beach was ruined because a silly classmate threw our life-size stuffed animal into the fire (thanks, Dwayne). Willie Wombat suffered serious burn injuries and everyone else had to run for more air to breathe.
The Other Source: Where Does Plastic In The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Come From? • Updates • The Ocean Cleanup
Again, landfills are hardly a great choice for waste management, as they take up space and generate greenhouse gases. So, in direct relation, what
The best option for handling non-recyclable plastics? The answer depends on what kind of combustion you’re talking about, Wilburforce.
If you’re thinking of burning your own plastic in the back, then heavens, take you to a landfill. Burning barrels and other backyard burning methods release horrible, toxic fumes full of dangerous chemicals, and plastics produce some of the worst offenders. Among them: dioxins and furans (hormone-disrupting, cancer-causing substances that accumulate in water, soil, crops and our bodies) and styrene gas (which damages the nervous system). Such things are dangerous not only for you, the burner, but also for your neighbors. It’s much better to put your plastic in landfill –
But if you think of large-scale garbage incinerators, often called waste-to-energy plants, then the picture becomes much murkier. Such plants burn garbage at very high temperatures, creating steam that is then used to generate electricity and sometimes to heat buildings. They’re quite popular in Europe, where they don’t have nearly as much open space to fill with landfills as we do, but they’re still pretty controversial around these parts.
How Much Plastic Actually Gets Recycled?
Proponents of waste-to-energy (think of them as Fiery Planetars) argue that these facilities are a great idea because, for example, they reduce the staggering amounts of trash we create. The average American is personally responsible for creating 4.4 pounds of trash each day, but incinerators can turn 2,000 pounds of trash into 300 to 600 pounds of ash. They also say that keeping garbage in landfills prevents emissions of planet-warming methane and is more efficient than transporting garbage to distant landfills. In addition, plastics generate more energy than other waste when burned. Their thinking goes: Since we throw away most of our plastic anyway—recycling rates are around 30 percent—why not burn it to recover that energy? Otherwise, we would probably be burning the original fossil fuel for the same power.
Anti-incinerators (Earth Planeteer seems like a good fit here), on the other hand, are concerned that incinerators emit the same harmful chemicals discussed above – dioxins, furans, heavy metals, and more. They still create toxic ash that ends up in landfills, and those high-temperature fires emit more carbon than coal-fired plants. And they are distracting us from the real solutions, opponents say, which should be recycling and composting, not just incineration. In some places, communities must deliver a certain amount of trash to a waste-to-energy plant to keep it in the black—which can mean perfectly good recyclables end up being diverted to the fire. Elsewhere, incinerators deal primarily with non-recyclable materials.
Time for a rebuttal: Fire Planeters counter that high-tech cleaning tools keep their chemical emissions under EPA air quality standards. Earth Planeteers claim that methane from landfills can be harvested as biogas and burned for electricity. Both sides then say that the other’s methods are not good enough, and meanwhile, worrying emissions continue to leak. It’s still going.
My opinion, Wilburforce? There is no perfect solution to plastic disposal, so what we should really be doing is creating and using less plastic –
Ghana’s Fishermen Are Drowning In Plastic. The Govt Is Trying To Tackle Pollution Before It’s Too Late.
Types that cannot be easily recycled. On an individual basis, this involves steps like buying in bulk, using reusable containers for everything, and buying second-hand (find more zero waste tips here). More broadly, we need to appeal to manufacturers to stop using throwaway plastic packaging – write down your favorites and tell them (see, there’s always something you can do!). I hope that one day we will reach a point where consumer materials are reused and recycled ad infinitum. Until that day, don’t forget your coffee mug, reusable takeout container, party glasses, menstrual cups… and so on.
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At , we don’t believe in paivall. Instead, we rely on our readers to suggest what they can so we can continue to bring you our solutions-based climate news. In early 2019, the engineering team is working on solutions to the challenges we face with System 001, while the research team remains focused on studying ocean plastic pollution. We believe that understanding the problem of ocean plastic pollution is essential if we are to effectively address it. Fortunately, our operations in the North Pacific provided an excellent opportunity to conduct additional sampling to further our research mission.
We are currently busy working on establishing a budget for ocean plastic mass. This means understanding where ocean plastic comes from, where it accumulates, and what happens to it in the long term. These questions involve improving our knowledge of different processes that occur on very different timescales. These questions are also essential for optimizing mitigation strategies and the future of cleanup operations. Reversing the tide of ocean plastic will require a combination of preventive and curative strategies; from controlled consumer demand and material innovation to investment in better waste management infrastructure and collection technology.
A Whopping 91 Percent Of Plastic Isn’t Recycled
One important aspect of establishing an ocean plastic budget is our understanding of plastic emissions into the ocean. After the initial assessment of global river emissions published in 2017, we realized that it is difficult to accurately predict where and how much plastic enters the ocean. We realized that plastic emissions are highly dependent on the geography of waste generation when coupled with topography and hydrology. Therefore, we first decided to investigate the geographical variation in the generation of mismanaged plastic waste.
Today, after several peer reviews, our global assessment of plastic waste generation is published in the humanities and social sciences journal, Nature Palgrave Communications: www.nature.com/articles/s41599-018-0212-7. The manuscript “Future Scenarios for Global Plastic Waste Generation and Disposal” presents a new and improved numerical method for predicting plastic waste generation based on economic and demographic indicators. Essentially, we created a high-resolution map of the distribution of plastic waste using several open-access global datasets, including country-level statistics for municipal solid waste, as well as the distribution of human population and gross domestic product (GDP).
For the calendar year 2015, we estimated that between 60 and 99 million metric tons of municipal plastic waste were improperly disposed of and released into the environment. Some of this waste will eventually be transported to the ocean. This interactive map presents the almost one kilometer resolution distribution of where this waste originated.
Rich, industrialized economies generate the largest amount of plastic waste per capita with values exceeding 100 kilograms per year and per capita. In populous countries such as China and India, lower per capita use of plastic combined with high population density can still lead to large amounts of plastic waste. In particular, in densely populated developing economies, high rates of plastic waste generation combined with inadequate waste management infrastructure result in significant amounts of plastic waste leaking into the environment. Currently, the global geography of mismanaged plastic waste generation is disproportionately greater on the Asian and African continents. Note that our model does not take into account unfair waste trade practices between industrialized and developing economies, which may exacerbate this disproportion.
Plastic In The Ocean
The advantage of using socio-economic indicators, such as population density and GDP, to predict waste generation is that this information is actively studied and future projections are available. We used these projections in our model and assessed plastic production and disposal under three scenarios.
Our first scenario was a business-as-usual case where demand for plastics grows with the economy and population, and no further waste management efforts are made. Under unchecked growth in demand for plastics, with current waste management standards, global environmental emissions could double by mid-century.
We tested another scenario where waste management infrastructure would improve over time as a country’s economy grows. Reported national waste data show that levels
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