alt Hacker News>Thank your ancestors, who were to lazy to recycle and treat the rest in a thermic process upfront. It bet those landfills could have easily been only one third the size and close to non-toxic.
My municipality is actively looking at how w're gonna get screwed over this right now as our landfill is slated to close in the mid to late 2030s.
There's plenty of idiots alive and affecting policy today who are why we can't come up with solutions. It's a giant goddamn circle of stupid.
Can't landfill it "because environment". Can't burn it "because environment". Can't have the local (because all this stuff is low margin and shipping eats margin) industry that could take a whole lot of this stuff as various feed stocks "because environment". Of course the lying assholes will be right there to tell you that they haven't literally banned X or Y, you just need to comply with requirements that they've carefully written so that there's not actually any suitable site for a new landfill or incineration/power operation in the whole state.
Clearly the only truly sustainable solution is one that doesn't involve listening to certain people.
There's a (relatively) much more sustainable solution right in front of us, commonly used in Europe, that nobody even considers in America because it costs more: burn it at a much higher temperature with specialized equipment (ensuring that combustion byproducts are themselves burned as well), use the resulting power for the grid, and compact the resulting ash in a well-managed landfill (which fills much, much more slowly vs. just throwing in garbage).