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.
Locked as OP has made it clear that this post is not really an open-ended question.
You sound so fucking smug it’s making me block you
Jesus you couldn’t be more of an ass if we stapled a donkey to you lol
And just look at that username, damn… Well I guess trash knows the most about trash, that checks out
Do we have a lost Lemmings sub like there was a lost Redditors one?
I reported the post for not being related to the community.
There are way more appropriate communities, such as [email protected]
If you really care about your post being in the appropriate place, you should delete your post and submit there, or delete your opinion from the post body and add it as a comment here.
This community isn’t for making grand stands.
Same here in switzerland. The amount of reare metals they extract from waste is impressive.
The best way to recycle is to re-use. In a professional kitchen; we see meat like chicken come bagged inside bags inside double walled / waxed cardboard boxes. -They could come in re-useable containers and go back to the source on the truck they came from.
Yeah, the 3 Rs are great. But it’s not happening and you’d need to change the government structure before you can enact the political change that would be required. But even if you’d manage to get rid of 90% of waste in the next decade, which you won’t, what’s your plan for the millions of tons that are left?
The solution for trash is to make it into a giant ball and launch it into space on a rocket. I’ve seen one prediction that we may avhieve this by 2052.
I’m not sure if you’re serious
He’s as serious as the Hypnotoad is insatiable.
Well this is interesting.
I worked for 7 years at a Swedish company who built granulators, Rapid Granulator AB. I worked stateside though as the only electrical technician.
From what I could glean about the machinery we built and sold, they would say that the only viable way to recycle plastic is as it was being manufactured. So say you’re a facotry making hundreds of garbage cans a day. All the rejects (wrong chemical makeup, big bulge from the molding process, etc) would go into a granulator for “recycling”. The granulator grinds it down into small pellets which are then used at the beginning of the line.
From what I remember, customers were very very picky about what could be used after granulation. A little bit of the wrong color of dye would ruin a whole batch for instance. I’m curious to see exactly how this site zero plans to recycle waste products coming from the general population, on an engineering / technical level…
This, of course, is also dancing around the fact that it’s a bit of an open secret that most places in America do not recycle. And I’m talking systemically, not on an individual level. In my county I know that all recycling goes to the exact same landfill as all the trash. It’s a bit hard to feel hopeful when the USA sends 242 million pounds of plastic straight to the ocean every year. I felt a little better about it when China would sort through and recycle our plastics.
The key is to make it profitable. As soon as there is money to be made there will be a shift in action.
On a personal level. Compost your own food waste to reduce anaerobic decomposition in landfill. Reuse and recycle.
Everything else needs government intervention to be made profitable and necessary.
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.
Oh, I’m sorry. Oh, I could put the trash into a landfill where it’s going to stay for millions of years or I could burn it up and get a nice smokey smell in here and let that smoke go into the sky where it turns into stars.
We in NL are so woefully behind, and nearly no one knows it. We all believe in our recycling programs, but they are mostly “trash.”
We have been doing all of this here in the US my entire life. I didn’t realize it was special to recycle and burn trash for energy. Good to see other countries doing it too I guess.
The best way to handle trash is to throw it into garbage. Duh.
