So, I’m not really interested in your opinion since almost every comment or post that I’ve ever read online about trash is based on trash knowledge about trash. I’m actually posting this “question” because it’s the biggest community on Lemmy where I can adjust my post to not break the rules and get a lot of people to read it.
This post is meant to inform you that unless you’re from one of the top countries when it comes to recycling and handling trash your knowledge is lacking about what’s possible and your country’s experts, politicians and media don’t know shit on this topic. I’m not going to make the environmental case since they already want better handling of trash. I’m going to tell you, with sources, how it’s technologically possible and above all profitable to handle trash. Since I’m from Sweden and we’re among the best in the world on trash I’m going to give you examples from Sweden.
Anyway, to the point
- By using landfills you’re burying money, trash has value. In Sweden only 1% of trash goes to landfills. We recycle about 47% and burn 52%.
I know what your knee-jerk reaction is: “Burning trash, how’s that environmental? What about air quality and other stuff?”.
Well, we clean the fumes extremely well and take care of the remaining waste by either using it or putting it in very controlled landfills.
Burning 4 tons if trash is equal in energy to burning 1 ton of oil. There’s your economical argument. We heat a million homes through district heating and provide electricity to 250,000 homes by burning trash. We’re 10 million people in the country.
Alright, I’m getting tiered of writing since I don’t know if this post will be removed or downvoted to obscurity I’m feeling my motivation diminishing so I’ll just finish on the big topic of plastic.
You’re wrong about plastic recycling. At least I’ve never read a comment that was right about it.
It is possible, and profitable to recycle almost all kinds of plastic. In Sweden we have one company that basically does all of the plastic recycling, “Swedish Plastic Recycling AB”. They’re currently building the world’s largest plastic recycling plant in Sweden, Site Zero.
It’s a mostly automated recycling plant that will be able to handle ALL of the plastic from the entire country and sort and recycle the following: PP, HDPE, LDPE, PET tray, PET bottles (colored and transparent), PP film, EPS, PS, PVC, two grades of Polyolefin mix, metal and non-plastic waste.
If this message resonated with you, feel free to take the post and expand upon it and by writing it better, providing more sources and making better arguments than I have. Then just paste it whenever the topic of trash is brought up.
It is profitable right now and has been for a long time, anywhere in the world. What’s lacking is knowledge that it could be profitable and investment will.
Take the US as an example. You get about 550 kWh of electricity per ton of burnt waste, that’s $20-30 per ton. And If you’d have district heating, which only a few places do you’d get a lot more.
But counting low. $20 per ton, multiplied by ~150 million tons of trash per year and you get 3 billion dollars per year that you’re burying instead of just burning.
Now this isn’t even accounting for the fact that about 20% of that is plastic, and that plastic is worth anywhere from 1 cent to 70 cents per pound. Let’s really lowball it and say that it’s worth $5 cents per pound on average. That’s $100 per ton. That multiplied by by the roughly 30 million tons of plastic that goes to landfills is worth another 3 billion. And we’re not even discussing metals, paper glass and all the other things that have surprisingly great value.
And let’s discuss compost. Here in Sweden we have a separate bin for that. It’s all collected and the methane is collected and sold as well as the nutrient compost when it’s done.
Yes! Reduce, Reuse, Recycle! But people aren’t doing that and the slogan has had very limited impact in the last 53 years.