All successful religions conduct group performance rituals to enforce conformity to dogma and shame heretics. Essays like this are soundly reasoned but miss the elephant in the room. Human history is dominated by mass delusion based on exaggerated fears and imaginary collective guilt.
What I found most interesting here is not simply the case for landfill, but the reminder that a solution can feel morally right while performing poorly against the outcome we actually care about.
I've been sympathetic to this argument for a while, but after correctly asserting that the argument against landfill vs recycling is overstated, it ends up committing similar errors in reverse.
For example, a big problem with landfill is methane release (which is much worse, pound for pound, than carbon), and while it can/does capture a fair bit of it, quantifying the amount is very difficult. The article doesn't really try to measure it, so waves it away as a concern.
Secondly, the headline (which I'm not sure they wrote) of 'Just bury your trash' is a poor policy recommendation, as the 'trash' does need to separate out all metal, probably cardboard, and foodwaste too - with the latter treated to capture methane waste.
Overall though, if the policy framework was shifted towards 'separate metal, separate cardboard, separate foodwaste, and landfill or burn the rest' then there's a lot to be said for it.
I'm sure this is a dumb question to people who know a lot about the recycling topic, but:
Doesn't using materials like cotton (from your comparison) instead of plastic keep stuff out of the landfill / break down faster? You point out that it uses more energy, but it seems like cheap clean energy may be around the corner. If we imagined that tomorrow we will have bountiful free energy, how much of this analysis stays the same or differs?
Tunnel vision. Side steps the toxicity issues that arise from microplastics and "forever chemicals". Also seems to accept that in consumer capitalism it is the consumer who is responsible for cleaning up messes. Where is any concern for reducing future rubbish at the product creation stage?
Curiously Aluminium foil (colloquially known as tin foil) is rarely recyclable despite the above. It’s one of the few things that ought to be yet somehow does not make the cut.
New York Times ran this as a story in the mid 1990s and things have not changed as much as they ought it seems.
good article, but it seems odd to focus on the energy costs of single use vs reusable rather than the materials. one being made of everlasting plastic and the other being made of biodegradable cotton. it seems that’s the reason environmentalists choose reusable.
I will be honest, while I by and large agree that the harms of landfills are overstated in the popular view (though Senedd Bound does point out the article might be overstating its own case), I didn't understand the point of the single-use vs reusable section. Reusing is a separate category of waste management from recycling, and the article is notionally about the landfill vs recycling axis. So why include a fairly poorly argued section on reuse at the start?
"In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic." I've been using one cotton tote bag as part of my grocery shopping every week for 5 years now. My parents have some they've been using for a decade. Neither they nor I are doing it consciously out of a moral mission to fight pollution, but we do it because the bags are better (stronger, higher capacity, being able to carry them on the shoulder makes it easier to carry heavy loads). We have more than beat the target of reuse to beat plastic, and I suspect that the majority of people with cotton bags do too.
Same goes for the other categories mentioned: the steel straw almost certainly beats plastic single-use ones over its life span, even when you include washing as part of the energy cost, for people who use straws at home; a ceramic mug that you use daily to drink coffee or tea for 5 years (and they can easily be used for much, much longer) trivially beats a polystyrene cup over its lifespan, and ten trips for a reusable milk bottle seems like a very low bar to cross to me. (I won't push back on reusable diapers.)
The argument that reusable is somehow "worse" just because you have to reuse x amount of times in order for it to be better ignores the real-world ways in which people *do* reuse them.
There is an important point to consider and it is microplastic pollution. The effect of this massive exposition to plastic is still heavy on health (endocrine-disrupting chemicals).
Great stuff - a point I made in the chapter "More Unpopular Opinions" in 2022's Losing My Religions. Thanks for the level-headed take, even though it goes against the green grain.
All successful religions conduct group performance rituals to enforce conformity to dogma and shame heretics. Essays like this are soundly reasoned but miss the elephant in the room. Human history is dominated by mass delusion based on exaggerated fears and imaginary collective guilt.
Preach
What I found most interesting here is not simply the case for landfill, but the reminder that a solution can feel morally right while performing poorly against the outcome we actually care about.
I've been sympathetic to this argument for a while, but after correctly asserting that the argument against landfill vs recycling is overstated, it ends up committing similar errors in reverse.
For example, a big problem with landfill is methane release (which is much worse, pound for pound, than carbon), and while it can/does capture a fair bit of it, quantifying the amount is very difficult. The article doesn't really try to measure it, so waves it away as a concern.
Secondly, the headline (which I'm not sure they wrote) of 'Just bury your trash' is a poor policy recommendation, as the 'trash' does need to separate out all metal, probably cardboard, and foodwaste too - with the latter treated to capture methane waste.
Overall though, if the policy framework was shifted towards 'separate metal, separate cardboard, separate foodwaste, and landfill or burn the rest' then there's a lot to be said for it.
I'm sure this is a dumb question to people who know a lot about the recycling topic, but:
Doesn't using materials like cotton (from your comparison) instead of plastic keep stuff out of the landfill / break down faster? You point out that it uses more energy, but it seems like cheap clean energy may be around the corner. If we imagined that tomorrow we will have bountiful free energy, how much of this analysis stays the same or differs?
Tunnel vision. Side steps the toxicity issues that arise from microplastics and "forever chemicals". Also seems to accept that in consumer capitalism it is the consumer who is responsible for cleaning up messes. Where is any concern for reducing future rubbish at the product creation stage?
Curiously Aluminium foil (colloquially known as tin foil) is rarely recyclable despite the above. It’s one of the few things that ought to be yet somehow does not make the cut.
New York Times ran this as a story in the mid 1990s and things have not changed as much as they ought it seems.
good article, but it seems odd to focus on the energy costs of single use vs reusable rather than the materials. one being made of everlasting plastic and the other being made of biodegradable cotton. it seems that’s the reason environmentalists choose reusable.
I will be honest, while I by and large agree that the harms of landfills are overstated in the popular view (though Senedd Bound does point out the article might be overstating its own case), I didn't understand the point of the single-use vs reusable section. Reusing is a separate category of waste management from recycling, and the article is notionally about the landfill vs recycling axis. So why include a fairly poorly argued section on reuse at the start?
"In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic." I've been using one cotton tote bag as part of my grocery shopping every week for 5 years now. My parents have some they've been using for a decade. Neither they nor I are doing it consciously out of a moral mission to fight pollution, but we do it because the bags are better (stronger, higher capacity, being able to carry them on the shoulder makes it easier to carry heavy loads). We have more than beat the target of reuse to beat plastic, and I suspect that the majority of people with cotton bags do too.
Same goes for the other categories mentioned: the steel straw almost certainly beats plastic single-use ones over its life span, even when you include washing as part of the energy cost, for people who use straws at home; a ceramic mug that you use daily to drink coffee or tea for 5 years (and they can easily be used for much, much longer) trivially beats a polystyrene cup over its lifespan, and ten trips for a reusable milk bottle seems like a very low bar to cross to me. (I won't push back on reusable diapers.)
The argument that reusable is somehow "worse" just because you have to reuse x amount of times in order for it to be better ignores the real-world ways in which people *do* reuse them.
There is an important point to consider and it is microplastic pollution. The effect of this massive exposition to plastic is still heavy on health (endocrine-disrupting chemicals).
Great stuff - a point I made in the chapter "More Unpopular Opinions" in 2022's Losing My Religions. Thanks for the level-headed take, even though it goes against the green grain.