Treating burying used plastics in deep well-designed landfills as a good thing for the environment, because it’s an efficient way to do carbon sequestration.
This. People seem totally confused when I say that plastic bags were not an environmental problem in developed countries because they were usually deposited in land-fills and this CO2 neutral.
Then that waste stream doesn’t count. That’s why I had to be specific about the goodness of well-designed landfills.
On the flip side, a lot of recycled plastic gets shipped elsewhere, and ends up just getting dumped in a low-quality landfill if it’s not valuable enough to actually bother recycling, so recycling isn’t a guaranteed fix to the issue either. If you care, you just have to look up your municipality’s waste stream practices in detail.
This. People seem totally confused when I say that plastic bags were not an environmental problem in developed countries because they were usually deposited in land-fills and this CO2 neutral.
Developed countries ship a lot of their trash overseas and don’t deposit it in deep well-designed landfills on their own territory.
Then that waste stream doesn’t count. That’s why I had to be specific about the goodness of well-designed landfills.
On the flip side, a lot of recycled plastic gets shipped elsewhere, and ends up just getting dumped in a low-quality landfill if it’s not valuable enough to actually bother recycling, so recycling isn’t a guaranteed fix to the issue either. If you care, you just have to look up your municipality’s waste stream practices in detail.