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.
Interesting points and I don’t doubt the information here. But completely missed was any impact to human health from microplastics or forever chemicals like PFAS that can come from manufacturing and landfills. That topic is an article itself I’m sure but not to mention them seems a little strange especially given their potential impact on human and environmental health.
Absolutely. I care about the environment, and stewarding well what we've been given, but ultimately it all needs to be subjective to the well-being of humanity. That's the whole point for me. I care nothing about "global warming".
Yes, but part of the answer to this is to improve the systems. Co-mingling trash causes contamination? Gosh given the amazing technological capabilities we’re unlocking right now, could we address that problem somehow?
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.
Remember the methane is coming mainly from decomposing organic matter in trash. That will still be generated even if you recycle as much as possible. It won't change no matter what you do. so try and capture more of it.
Thats not true. Organic matter can go to anareobic digestion plants that produce energy and burn every bit of methane. There are 3000 of those plants in Germany.
Small correction: they claim 75% "typical" capture. The range definitely goes much lower than that.
More important point: "in the long run they are the same"... depends what you mean by "long run". Over 100 years, methane has a global warming potential almost 30 times higher than CO2. I think 100 years is a very relevant timescale to talk about global warming, so calling it "short run" is potentially misleading.
Agreed that an overlooked aspect is that the initial separation of waste types at household level actually has downstream tangible benefits for landfill. There is no conflict between the two actions, even if the initial basis of "recycling" proves not so true.
The cost of recycling and the materials we produce are also not static. Today's butter tubs that are too costly to recycle could be replaced with something better through research funding linked to associated industries.
(This is not sarcasm) I thought this handled methane release, but I'm not familiar with the topic. Can you give a more concrete example of a concern it missed? I thought the argument was snug, you say it isn't, could you demonstrate the gap please?
The methane is from organic waste, which should be composted at home by 99% of the population anyway (yes, even in apartments - I've done it. No smell, no bugs.)
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.
I don't belong to any group concerned about the environment, social or otherwise. But I bring my own bags, because intuitively it seems less wasteful. I also have personally picked up hundreds of them out of the streets and waterways over the years.
Now I learn the data says single-use is better. Great. But I might be one of the rare ones that gets 100s of uses out of my stuff so that the payback actually happens.
Even a medium quality tote bag lasts me years, I don’t see how it could be more expensive or more inefficient. I would love to see stats on how many uses people do for such bags.
all successful religions are part of the functioning of a society they're embedded in and can, with inertia, react to innovation and changes in their environment. while an analysis of the group psychology of environmental concerns as religious is not without merit, it simply does not follow that "things that are kinda like religion" totally protect people from changing their minds about best practices.
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.
Agree. I have 2 cotton bags I've used for 26 years, and 2 others for ~15 years. Those who argue that washing cotton bags counteracts the environmental savings -- what are y'all putting in your shopping cart? My produce goes into (horrors!) reusable bags that contain debris, everything else is packaged. I probably wash them 3 or 4 times a year and have managed to avoid illness.
I am open to the argument that OP makes, but my concern is that people will read this and think, great, I can unthinkingly consume guilt-free.
To me, personally, trying to keep as much as possible out of landfills is tied into (ugh, cringe phrase but it's accurate) living mindfully.
I disagree. In the US, we get reusable cotton bags all the time. I bet I have received closer to a thousand of them in the last decade than one. And I am not the only person in my household. Yes, my wife might use a couple of select ones repeatedly. Dozens of times perhaps. Maybe more. But most are not used again at all, or just for one extra use (storing odds and ends or such).
In other words, your denominator is an order of magnitude or two off from what I see as the real world, at least in the US. I bet the median usage of a cotton bag is 1, and surveys are getting people to answer about not all bags but their one favorite bag.
On top of that they need to wash these (rerelease actually reused) bags regularly, or… seriously gross.
I can see the value in disposable plastic going to a landfill (in the US we call these “future golf courses”) and a rare favorite cloth bag.
That's absurd. I've lived in the US for 48 years and have never once been given, or ever heard of anyone i know - and I'm in green circles! - being given a cotton tote bag. Not. One. The polypropylene woven bags you get as swag at trade shows etc are different- they're plastic, for one, and the break even point is 9-10 uses instead of 150. But nobody is giving away cotton totes. You have to donate like $120 to get one from Npr!
I have a few that might be cotton, but I keep them and use hundreds of times. I'm mostly using plastic reusable bags, though, and given that a good number are from HEB and I moved out of Texas four years ago, I'm probably at a couple hundred uses minimum already.
And...I use them because they're better. I'll continue to cycle in new ones as they show up at a rate of *maybe* one per year. It's not an environmental strategy, but this article is supplying data showing that it *is* good for the environment while trying to imply that it's the opposite. A more thoughtfully written article would have been better.
I am definitely not an expert of when a fabric bag does or does not qualify as cotton. Not sure how that plays into the argument, but I will grant you this point!
Sorry for my outburst. The polypropylene bags are thinner and usually have a detectable texture like a hatch or a weave. They usually fold flat and often have obvious creases, whereas the seams on cotton bags are more like clothing seams. They weigh a lot less than the cotton totes.
They're both stitched. Now that I'm looking at them side by side i realize the differences are more subtle than i assumed.
The argument is, if you waste resources to make reusable items to substitute for disposable ones, you should first determine if the result is worse than if you had instead used the disposable item instead. If you use the disposable item, then you should know whether burying it in a landfill has less bad effects than recycling it. Or you can choose to just remain in the dark and use a reusable bag because it feels virtuous.
Yeah, I thought the "you'd have to use it 173 times" was pretty poor. 173 isn't that big a number. If they wanted to make the point that most of them don't get used 173 times, they need to state and evidence that, not just vaguely imply it.
I never understood the opposition to landfilling single-use plastics. We dig the oil out of the ground, turn it into plastic, I use the plastic, we put the plastic back into the ground.
"That plastic water bottle takes 500 years to break down" well the oil was at least 65 million years old, that's literally the blink of an eye.
Its the issue of human time scales and where that plastic is. It accumulates and degrades the look of wherever it is literred its not in concentrated areas like oil is
I vote we put it in concentrated areas like landfills, and if it's not in a landfill I'll help by picking it up and putting it in a trash can so it goes there.
It's not clear how long and how easily these landfills can be maintained though they do the job right now, as for litter you either need a lot more surveillance and stricter laws around it, or we need to commission heroes like you for the job. I vote for that too btw, Eric C. lifetime anti-litterman. We'll give you a cape for it. A polyester one.
Any plastic exposed to sun and air does not last 500 years. Not likely more that a year or two. Leave some plastic out in the sun yourself. It breaks down much quicker than you would think.
That's just breaking down a big piece of indigestible plastic into lots and lots of tiny pieces of indigestible plastic, small enough to get into every part of your body, and into any living creature. We need to learn to make those bottles of something else.
Of course we must safeguard our Precious Bodily Fluids. However I am less convinced that the famously inert material plastic, which lasts 500 years in a landfill will cause health problems on a human timeline.
One of my wife’s body washes proudly proclaims that they switched from plastic scrubbing beads to using sand. Do I need to be worried about micro-sands in my bloodstream now? I don’t think I do.
There have been plenty of meaningful studies done on how plastics are affecting the endocrine system of humans. Fertility issues are strongly linked to it. And it’s multigenerational poisoning too. Infants are born with plastic elements already in their bloodstreams via mom.
I tend to think microplastics are probably not harmful, but I think an article saying "just keep making plastic and burying it forever" should mention the best evidence that microplastics are not harmful, or admit this is a weak point in its argument.
There's something to be said for not putting something in every tissue of every living organism until you're very confident indeed that it's harmless.
Don't know why people just ignore this. "I vote we put it in the trash" as if litter doesn't exist and accumulate beyond the capacity of law enforcement
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).
Microplastics may just be an artifact of the equipment used to find them. If they are a real problem, then do we know that trying to recycle them rather than contain them in landfills releases less of them into the environment?
I really wasn't expecting to find microplastics critics (or skeptics...) on substack.
It is true that multiple studies were found wrong because of the gloves or equipment used for tests, but what about the study that found microplastics on testicles and semen in 100% of the subjects? And there are many other that corrected the equipment problem.
Containing them in landfills could impact the underground water if they are not fully isolated. That underground water becomes tap water and filters are not enough because microplastics are too thin.
For recycling we should be able to have a bigger control on the matter, but I agree that this needs to be proven.
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?
This. Plastic, for the most part, doesn’t break down, ever.
And also: <sigh>. This old bad faith tactic of cherry-picking externalities again. ~20 years ago it was about how HumVees were actually more energy efficient if you did the calculations in a certain way.
I think it's worth learning why they did this, rather than assuming. If you just assume you're right and they're dumb, it will be hard to learn new things, and I have a lot of stuff I do not yet know.
Just to note that this isn't actually an argument. If you think the externalities are cherry picked, you should say which ones, and why that belief is justified.
The whole point of the article is that the social costs of putting stuff in the landfill are very small. Even if energy got substantially cheaper + less carbon-intensive, I don't think it would be comparable.
Yeah, the whole article seemed weirdly short-termist to me. The statement "cheap clean energy may be around the corner" seems like a slight overstatement imo, but it's definitely true that the balance of pros and cons in terms of energy use, raw materials use, pollutants, GHG emissions from waste, are all likely to change over time, including in the relatively short term.
Waste management is a fundamentally very long-term problem. Policy proposals now will lock in their outcomes for decades. We need to think about how the costs and benefits will change in 10, 20, 50 years' time.
The issue is that if you imagine free energy everything is easy. Direct air capture could be done easily in a number of ways with infinite energy. You could also reform plastics, etc.
But while solar is great relative to coal or gas, it's not quite so abundant that energy won't be a constraint anytime soon.
Don't know why this article had to confuse two issues in one, recycling vs single use plastics. Those are distinct questions. A comparison would be recycling vs landfill use vs destruction. Its also unclear what the long term maintenance issues would be of landfilling-its good now is it so long term?
As for single use plastics, the comparison would be between that and multi use, and a separate comparison on the types of materials, taking in the energy requirement for production along with a number of oither factors. There is a not-yet-closed question about the health and environmental (soil depletion ) harms of.
Samo Burja's essay on recycling sufficed for the issue of recycling and this doesn't provide anything to further us in analysis of the issue or reasoning ideal solutions. Not really up to the works in progress standard. Frankly better is expected from a longtermist too.
As explained in the article, modern landfills contain their waste and do not increase soil depletion. As waste in a landfill decays, it turns into useful methane. If a landfill becomes full, it can easily be sealed after the waste has fully decayed, and a new one built nearby. There is no shortage of space for landfills except in isolated places like Hawaii. Inspections can be done as long as populations don’t decline too much, and when populations collapse, so will trash production.
I didn't say anything about soil depletion from land fills. I spoke about soil depletion from plastics.
Didn't say anything about running out of land or the issue of methane either.
Maintenance is literally a perpetual concern. Its insensible to not actually address long term maintenance because we've figured out decades long maintenance.
Perhaps better to live in ignorance by ignoring the world. How much trash is exported to low-income countries? This article is totally silent on it. The trash and supposed “recycling” produced in the US and other high income countries is literally killing the world. Instead of pushing for better recycling and trash management solutions here in the US, you are saying let’s keep producing landfill - perhaps because folks here are never going to get buried under this trash.
The article clearly was arguing for well managed landfills within developed nations. Something we are proven to be great at. Not for exporting our garbage to Africa.
Do you know how much trash the US exports? Without giving any magnitude of the trash this country produces and then exports, not sure what qualifies this statement “we are proven to be great at”
The article is not recommending exporting garbage, neither am I. Stick to the topic at hand, rather than bringing up a straw man argument that is something that you can do well against.
The “be great at” comment relates to the article’s description of how landfills actually work here. I have an old landfill that I can see from my window as I type this. It is now a home to sage, rabbits, squirrels, coyotes, bobcats, and myriad of birds. In Texas, I used to play golf on a beautiful course that used to be a landfill.
Summary. Landfills are a great local solution for most trash. Recycling makes sense for a few select categories like cardboard and glass. Forcing recycling where it makes no sense is more about empty virtue signaling than common sense.
As trash? None. No one exports trash, because no one wants to buy it, because it's trash.
As recyclable scrap? A very modest (relative to our size) amount, and if we followed the article writer's recommendations, that number would go down significantly.
I think you're fighting a straw man. When people say "exporting trash", I think they mean "paying people in other countries to take our trash" rather than "selling our trash". (I think the amount this happens is often overstated, but I think it does happen, no?)
Tbh the main problem in this sub-thread is that none of us know or can be bothered to look up what the figure are. Zaineb says "do you know how much? I bet it's loads"; Swami and you say "not sure, but I bet it's not very much", and I come in accusing you of pedantry over the definition of "export".
I'm staying out of the debate over whether it's "too much" or not, but if anybody else wants to persuade each other, they've gotta look up the stats.
Came to say the same thing. I'm broadly sympathetic to the article's argument for pragmatism, but I cannot escape the multiple sources of info reporting trash dumping of plastics to low-income countries to some quite bad effects.
It's not clear to me if attempts at recycling make this better or worse, but there's clearly a negative externality and I'm not convinced in the regulatory environment as a consequence.
That video makes clear that what was exported was recyclable plastics, not trash, despite the headline. The factory described there paid money to buy it!
Right, I literally thought this was going to be an explanation of how plastics recycling is essentially a myth, so it's better for westerners to put their plastic in the trash where it can be properly contained rather than literally dumped on the ground in other countries or dumped at sea, etc. I was surprised when hat he started talking about cotton bags, my reusable bags are all poly.
I no longer separate plastics out for my recycling, just metal and paper.
Your analysis appears to be US focussed with a US outlook. Some countries such as the UK they are running out of space for landfill. In many European/UK urban areas there is quite sophisticated separation of waste at the point of disposal as it is far more effective to do it at this point rather than separate once it has all been mixed up
There is brownfield and vacant land UK enough to double currently existing landfills. And many times as much in uncropped arable land. The limiting factor, as with other things such as energy and freedom of speech, is regulations made by the UK government.
Man, this is a pretty classic case of using a handful of facts to build a misleading, clickbait conclusion. Unfortunately, people love articles like this because it makes the easy way out feel justified.
The biggest problem for me is the apples-to-oranges comparison. The authors give us the better/best version of landfill technology, but they compare it to some of the messiest, least efficient examples of recycling and reuse. Where is the same level of analysis on the best-in-class recycling and circularity systems?
But the biggest thing missing from this analysis is what happens before the waste is even created. Recycling isn’t just about avoiding landfill, it’s about avoiding the mining, logging, drilling, processing, habitat loss, pollution, and emissions required to produce more virgin material.
The systems are far from perfect but articles like this will prevent legitimate public support for necessary change. We all should be working hard to solve for every pathway of this complicated problem by improving what reuse looks like in our economy, further modernizing recycling and organics systems, improving landfill engineering and methane capture, and extracting far, far less in the first place.
Some good points here, but the author is astonishingly silent on the impact of environmental plastics on human health. Not to mention the natural world. Energetics are important, but they are at best only half the story of plastics today. Looking forward to the sequel.
I think most people in the West recycle today because it makes them feel good about themselves. The sense of contributing to the well being of others is sorely lacking in contemporary culture, and this is a cheap - and economically unproductive - of feeling useful.
This important article sadly side-steps the root cause of all our issues: the blind, foolhardy and ruthless usage of Earth’s resources. We in the Western world need to simplify our lifestyles—merely so the rest of the world can live.
Americans make up 4.5% of the world’s population yet consume 25% of its resources: clearly this is unjust. We need to pursue degrowth as individuals, and if we cannot, rationing becomes essential public policy at a time when almost all life on Earth is on the lip of collapse, if not extinction, due to manmade climate disruption.
Your comment is quite possibly the most poorly thought out comment that I have read on the internet all year. We use the planets energy and resources to advance the prosperity and quality of life of humanity. If this is a bad thing to you, then you are declaring something about your values which should cause you to reconsider your world view.
There is nothing unjust about creating more value for ourselves by converting resources and energy into human flourishing. The “problem” is not with those creating prosperity, it is instead that so many haven’t been able to follow our example.
Climate change is certainly a concern (a negative externality of prosperity). But it is minor compared to the costs of poverty and poor health. Certainly it is something we can address, and probably already would have if idiotic environmentalists hadn’t derailed nuclear energy 50 years ago.
If you want to pursue degrowth, please feel free to do so on a personal level. But I have a better suggestion… why don’t you actually start to regularly read “Works In Progress” so that you aren’t so dangerously uninformed?
hey doc, what happens to all those resources after we yanks use them up? If we used up a quarter of the world’s resources every year, we would have run out a long time ago. Since population will soon start declining rapidly, it’s doubtful humanity has enough time to harm the climate before making themselves, let alone all other life, extinct.
Americans employ twenty-five percent of resources used worldwide, with the US military responsible for releasing ~5% of all green-house gases. Greed knows no bounds and is the greatest cause of poverty, injustice, ecocide, and violence worldwide.
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?
Does recycling plastic produce more or less microplastic to the environment than sealing it in a landfill? If a forever chemical is actually permanent (hence the name) it obviously cannot be recycled and sealing it in an impermeable landfill is a good thing to do with it.
Forever chemicals or PFAS are only added to certain plastics/plastic coatings. Items with these are probably better in the landfkll than recycled, but using metal or ceramic or glass other materials avoids the use of PFAS entirely, which is much preferrable. We also need to limit PFAS in plastic production as well, but until that happens you're better off avoiding them.
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.
As a cotton bag user, it’s because the energy cost was never a factor. People dislike using plastic bags because they don’t want to put them into landfill where they will last for millions of years or whatever. Admittedly, this article does a lot to dispel those anxieties, but it’s fair to say that the energy cost of plastics has never been a huge concern for most people.
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.
Interesting points and I don’t doubt the information here. But completely missed was any impact to human health from microplastics or forever chemicals like PFAS that can come from manufacturing and landfills. That topic is an article itself I’m sure but not to mention them seems a little strange especially given their potential impact on human and environmental health.
Absolutely. I care about the environment, and stewarding well what we've been given, but ultimately it all needs to be subjective to the well-being of humanity. That's the whole point for me. I care nothing about "global warming".
What I found most interesting is the reminder how effective a straw man argument can be.
Which part did you think was a straw man?
The pro-recycling argument. Your single use plastic is dumped into the ocean, killing sea turtles.
That wasn’t the whole argument though.
At the grocery store we carry our virtue in an ugly bag.
many such cases
Yes, but part of the answer to this is to improve the systems. Co-mingling trash causes contamination? Gosh given the amazing technological capabilities we’re unlocking right now, could we address that problem somehow?
No bc the amazing tech capabilities aren’t that great 😂🙃. They can’t even do my laundry.
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.
Remember the methane is coming mainly from decomposing organic matter in trash. That will still be generated even if you recycle as much as possible. It won't change no matter what you do. so try and capture more of it.
Thats not true. Organic matter can go to anareobic digestion plants that produce energy and burn every bit of methane. There are 3000 of those plants in Germany.
So is there an argument to make that municipal compost would have a better environmental impact than recycling everything?
They claim 75%-95% methane capture, is that wrong?
Also your own comment claims methane is worse then carbon - that's only true in the short run, in the long run they are the same.
“Captures 95% of plutonium” - what the article lacked is a value, not just a percentage.
Plutonium, you say? https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-most-dangerous-substance-known-to-man/
It's a percent of methane released. Which is worth about 30x as CO2 over 100 years.
If you're asking for an amount, it would obviously depend on the amount of organic waste in the landfill which is different for every landfill.
But it doesn't affect the issue with recycling since organics are not being recycled in any case.
I’ve also been reading about these landfill fires that cannot be extinguished. Is this only a problem with older landfills?
Small correction: they claim 75% "typical" capture. The range definitely goes much lower than that.
More important point: "in the long run they are the same"... depends what you mean by "long run". Over 100 years, methane has a global warming potential almost 30 times higher than CO2. I think 100 years is a very relevant timescale to talk about global warming, so calling it "short run" is potentially misleading.
Agreed that an overlooked aspect is that the initial separation of waste types at household level actually has downstream tangible benefits for landfill. There is no conflict between the two actions, even if the initial basis of "recycling" proves not so true.
The cost of recycling and the materials we produce are also not static. Today's butter tubs that are too costly to recycle could be replaced with something better through research funding linked to associated industries.
(This is not sarcasm) I thought this handled methane release, but I'm not familiar with the topic. Can you give a more concrete example of a concern it missed? I thought the argument was snug, you say it isn't, could you demonstrate the gap please?
The methane is from organic waste, which should be composted at home by 99% of the population anyway (yes, even in apartments - I've done it. No smell, no bugs.)
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.
I don't belong to any group concerned about the environment, social or otherwise. But I bring my own bags, because intuitively it seems less wasteful. I also have personally picked up hundreds of them out of the streets and waterways over the years.
Now I learn the data says single-use is better. Great. But I might be one of the rare ones that gets 100s of uses out of my stuff so that the payback actually happens.
Even a medium quality tote bag lasts me years, I don’t see how it could be more expensive or more inefficient. I would love to see stats on how many uses people do for such bags.
I can speak for a lot of people I know - they also probably get hundreds of uses out of a cotton tote bag, the problem is they have 30 of them
My wife is the same. Yet she has never (ever!) cleaned one of them.
Leakage from the groceries is a real thing, so I pay an extra $.10 for paper bags.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/grocery-bag-environmental-impact
Perhaps a good takeaway could be: use your tote bags for everything but groceries, it stays cleaner and easier to use for non-grocery items as well
Preach
all successful religions are part of the functioning of a society they're embedded in and can, with inertia, react to innovation and changes in their environment. while an analysis of the group psychology of environmental concerns as religious is not without merit, it simply does not follow that "things that are kinda like religion" totally protect people from changing their minds about best practices.
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.
Agree. I have 2 cotton bags I've used for 26 years, and 2 others for ~15 years. Those who argue that washing cotton bags counteracts the environmental savings -- what are y'all putting in your shopping cart? My produce goes into (horrors!) reusable bags that contain debris, everything else is packaged. I probably wash them 3 or 4 times a year and have managed to avoid illness.
I am open to the argument that OP makes, but my concern is that people will read this and think, great, I can unthinkingly consume guilt-free.
To me, personally, trying to keep as much as possible out of landfills is tied into (ugh, cringe phrase but it's accurate) living mindfully.
I disagree. In the US, we get reusable cotton bags all the time. I bet I have received closer to a thousand of them in the last decade than one. And I am not the only person in my household. Yes, my wife might use a couple of select ones repeatedly. Dozens of times perhaps. Maybe more. But most are not used again at all, or just for one extra use (storing odds and ends or such).
In other words, your denominator is an order of magnitude or two off from what I see as the real world, at least in the US. I bet the median usage of a cotton bag is 1, and surveys are getting people to answer about not all bags but their one favorite bag.
On top of that they need to wash these (rerelease actually reused) bags regularly, or… seriously gross.
I can see the value in disposable plastic going to a landfill (in the US we call these “future golf courses”) and a rare favorite cloth bag.
That's absurd. I've lived in the US for 48 years and have never once been given, or ever heard of anyone i know - and I'm in green circles! - being given a cotton tote bag. Not. One. The polypropylene woven bags you get as swag at trade shows etc are different- they're plastic, for one, and the break even point is 9-10 uses instead of 150. But nobody is giving away cotton totes. You have to donate like $120 to get one from Npr!
I have a few that might be cotton, but I keep them and use hundreds of times. I'm mostly using plastic reusable bags, though, and given that a good number are from HEB and I moved out of Texas four years ago, I'm probably at a couple hundred uses minimum already.
And...I use them because they're better. I'll continue to cycle in new ones as they show up at a rate of *maybe* one per year. It's not an environmental strategy, but this article is supplying data showing that it *is* good for the environment while trying to imply that it's the opposite. A more thoughtfully written article would have been better.
I am definitely not an expert of when a fabric bag does or does not qualify as cotton. Not sure how that plays into the argument, but I will grant you this point!
Sorry for my outburst. The polypropylene bags are thinner and usually have a detectable texture like a hatch or a weave. They usually fold flat and often have obvious creases, whereas the seams on cotton bags are more like clothing seams. They weigh a lot less than the cotton totes.
They're both stitched. Now that I'm looking at them side by side i realize the differences are more subtle than i assumed.
The argument is, if you waste resources to make reusable items to substitute for disposable ones, you should first determine if the result is worse than if you had instead used the disposable item instead. If you use the disposable item, then you should know whether burying it in a landfill has less bad effects than recycling it. Or you can choose to just remain in the dark and use a reusable bag because it feels virtuous.
Yeah, I thought the "you'd have to use it 173 times" was pretty poor. 173 isn't that big a number. If they wanted to make the point that most of them don't get used 173 times, they need to state and evidence that, not just vaguely imply it.
I never understood the opposition to landfilling single-use plastics. We dig the oil out of the ground, turn it into plastic, I use the plastic, we put the plastic back into the ground.
"That plastic water bottle takes 500 years to break down" well the oil was at least 65 million years old, that's literally the blink of an eye.
Its the issue of human time scales and where that plastic is. It accumulates and degrades the look of wherever it is literred its not in concentrated areas like oil is
I vote we put it in concentrated areas like landfills, and if it's not in a landfill I'll help by picking it up and putting it in a trash can so it goes there.
It's not clear how long and how easily these landfills can be maintained though they do the job right now, as for litter you either need a lot more surveillance and stricter laws around it, or we need to commission heroes like you for the job. I vote for that too btw, Eric C. lifetime anti-litterman. We'll give you a cape for it. A polyester one.
But single use plastic is dirty, often with organic materials which then decays and leaks.
Any plastic exposed to sun and air does not last 500 years. Not likely more that a year or two. Leave some plastic out in the sun yourself. It breaks down much quicker than you would think.
That's just breaking down a big piece of indigestible plastic into lots and lots of tiny pieces of indigestible plastic, small enough to get into every part of your body, and into any living creature. We need to learn to make those bottles of something else.
Of course we must safeguard our Precious Bodily Fluids. However I am less convinced that the famously inert material plastic, which lasts 500 years in a landfill will cause health problems on a human timeline.
One of my wife’s body washes proudly proclaims that they switched from plastic scrubbing beads to using sand. Do I need to be worried about micro-sands in my bloodstream now? I don’t think I do.
Even if the plastic itself is inert, toxic pollutants in the air and water bond to it, and thereby accumulate in our bodies along with the plastic.
There have been plenty of meaningful studies done on how plastics are affecting the endocrine system of humans. Fertility issues are strongly linked to it. And it’s multigenerational poisoning too. Infants are born with plastic elements already in their bloodstreams via mom.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214750026000284
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969723048830
I tend to think microplastics are probably not harmful, but I think an article saying "just keep making plastic and burying it forever" should mention the best evidence that microplastics are not harmful, or admit this is a weak point in its argument.
There's something to be said for not putting something in every tissue of every living organism until you're very confident indeed that it's harmless.
Don't know why people just ignore this. "I vote we put it in the trash" as if litter doesn't exist and accumulate beyond the capacity of law enforcement
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).
Microplastics may just be an artifact of the equipment used to find them. If they are a real problem, then do we know that trying to recycle them rather than contain them in landfills releases less of them into the environment?
I really wasn't expecting to find microplastics critics (or skeptics...) on substack.
It is true that multiple studies were found wrong because of the gloves or equipment used for tests, but what about the study that found microplastics on testicles and semen in 100% of the subjects? And there are many other that corrected the equipment problem.
Containing them in landfills could impact the underground water if they are not fully isolated. That underground water becomes tap water and filters are not enough because microplastics are too thin.
For recycling we should be able to have a bigger control on the matter, but I agree that this needs to be proven.
The big study on microplastics apparently had its data badly corrupted by the plastic gloves used.
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?
This. Plastic, for the most part, doesn’t break down, ever.
And also: <sigh>. This old bad faith tactic of cherry-picking externalities again. ~20 years ago it was about how HumVees were actually more energy efficient if you did the calculations in a certain way.
I think it's worth learning why they did this, rather than assuming. If you just assume you're right and they're dumb, it will be hard to learn new things, and I have a lot of stuff I do not yet know.
Just to note that this isn't actually an argument. If you think the externalities are cherry picked, you should say which ones, and why that belief is justified.
The whole point of the article is that the social costs of putting stuff in the landfill are very small. Even if energy got substantially cheaper + less carbon-intensive, I don't think it would be comparable.
Yeah, the whole article seemed weirdly short-termist to me. The statement "cheap clean energy may be around the corner" seems like a slight overstatement imo, but it's definitely true that the balance of pros and cons in terms of energy use, raw materials use, pollutants, GHG emissions from waste, are all likely to change over time, including in the relatively short term.
Waste management is a fundamentally very long-term problem. Policy proposals now will lock in their outcomes for decades. We need to think about how the costs and benefits will change in 10, 20, 50 years' time.
The issue is that if you imagine free energy everything is easy. Direct air capture could be done easily in a number of ways with infinite energy. You could also reform plastics, etc.
But while solar is great relative to coal or gas, it's not quite so abundant that energy won't be a constraint anytime soon.
No, air capture is still really hard with nuclear!
Absolutely, that's the point, there is no free abundant energy source that would trivialize energy costs.
Now if we could do fusion or a truly huge scale or space solar with transmission, then maybe. But who knows when either of those would be feasible
Don't know why this article had to confuse two issues in one, recycling vs single use plastics. Those are distinct questions. A comparison would be recycling vs landfill use vs destruction. Its also unclear what the long term maintenance issues would be of landfilling-its good now is it so long term?
As for single use plastics, the comparison would be between that and multi use, and a separate comparison on the types of materials, taking in the energy requirement for production along with a number of oither factors. There is a not-yet-closed question about the health and environmental (soil depletion ) harms of.
Samo Burja's essay on recycling sufficed for the issue of recycling and this doesn't provide anything to further us in analysis of the issue or reasoning ideal solutions. Not really up to the works in progress standard. Frankly better is expected from a longtermist too.
As explained in the article, modern landfills contain their waste and do not increase soil depletion. As waste in a landfill decays, it turns into useful methane. If a landfill becomes full, it can easily be sealed after the waste has fully decayed, and a new one built nearby. There is no shortage of space for landfills except in isolated places like Hawaii. Inspections can be done as long as populations don’t decline too much, and when populations collapse, so will trash production.
I didn't say anything about soil depletion from land fills. I spoke about soil depletion from plastics.
Didn't say anything about running out of land or the issue of methane either.
Maintenance is literally a perpetual concern. Its insensible to not actually address long term maintenance because we've figured out decades long maintenance.
A strange time to write this article when this was recently reported:
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/gallery/2026/8/24/photos-towering-landfill-collapse-kills-30-in-guineas-capital-conakry
Perhaps better to live in ignorance by ignoring the world. How much trash is exported to low-income countries? This article is totally silent on it. The trash and supposed “recycling” produced in the US and other high income countries is literally killing the world. Instead of pushing for better recycling and trash management solutions here in the US, you are saying let’s keep producing landfill - perhaps because folks here are never going to get buried under this trash.
The article clearly was arguing for well managed landfills within developed nations. Something we are proven to be great at. Not for exporting our garbage to Africa.
Do you know how much trash the US exports? Without giving any magnitude of the trash this country produces and then exports, not sure what qualifies this statement “we are proven to be great at”
The article is not recommending exporting garbage, neither am I. Stick to the topic at hand, rather than bringing up a straw man argument that is something that you can do well against.
The “be great at” comment relates to the article’s description of how landfills actually work here. I have an old landfill that I can see from my window as I type this. It is now a home to sage, rabbits, squirrels, coyotes, bobcats, and myriad of birds. In Texas, I used to play golf on a beautiful course that used to be a landfill.
Summary. Landfills are a great local solution for most trash. Recycling makes sense for a few select categories like cardboard and glass. Forcing recycling where it makes no sense is more about empty virtue signaling than common sense.
"Do you know how much trash the US exports?"
As trash? None. No one exports trash, because no one wants to buy it, because it's trash.
As recyclable scrap? A very modest (relative to our size) amount, and if we followed the article writer's recommendations, that number would go down significantly.
"no one wants to buy it because it's trash"
I think you're fighting a straw man. When people say "exporting trash", I think they mean "paying people in other countries to take our trash" rather than "selling our trash". (I think the amount this happens is often overstated, but I think it does happen, no?)
Tbh the main problem in this sub-thread is that none of us know or can be bothered to look up what the figure are. Zaineb says "do you know how much? I bet it's loads"; Swami and you say "not sure, but I bet it's not very much", and I come in accusing you of pedantry over the definition of "export".
I'm staying out of the debate over whether it's "too much" or not, but if anybody else wants to persuade each other, they've gotta look up the stats.
Came to say the same thing. I'm broadly sympathetic to the article's argument for pragmatism, but I cannot escape the multiple sources of info reporting trash dumping of plastics to low-income countries to some quite bad effects.
It's not clear to me if attempts at recycling make this better or worse, but there's clearly a negative externality and I'm not convinced in the regulatory environment as a consequence.
I don't think I've seen even one source of info claiming that developed countries are exporting trash (only recycling). Can you provide a citation?
That notably woke publication Business Insider
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-americas-trash-fuels-toxic-tofu-in-indonesia-2025-9
That video makes clear that what was exported was recyclable plastics, not trash, despite the headline. The factory described there paid money to buy it!
Right, I literally thought this was going to be an explanation of how plastics recycling is essentially a myth, so it's better for westerners to put their plastic in the trash where it can be properly contained rather than literally dumped on the ground in other countries or dumped at sea, etc. I was surprised when hat he started talking about cotton bags, my reusable bags are all poly.
I no longer separate plastics out for my recycling, just metal and paper.
Your analysis appears to be US focussed with a US outlook. Some countries such as the UK they are running out of space for landfill. In many European/UK urban areas there is quite sophisticated separation of waste at the point of disposal as it is far more effective to do it at this point rather than separate once it has all been mixed up
There is brownfield and vacant land UK enough to double currently existing landfills. And many times as much in uncropped arable land. The limiting factor, as with other things such as energy and freedom of speech, is regulations made by the UK government.
Man, this is a pretty classic case of using a handful of facts to build a misleading, clickbait conclusion. Unfortunately, people love articles like this because it makes the easy way out feel justified.
The biggest problem for me is the apples-to-oranges comparison. The authors give us the better/best version of landfill technology, but they compare it to some of the messiest, least efficient examples of recycling and reuse. Where is the same level of analysis on the best-in-class recycling and circularity systems?
But the biggest thing missing from this analysis is what happens before the waste is even created. Recycling isn’t just about avoiding landfill, it’s about avoiding the mining, logging, drilling, processing, habitat loss, pollution, and emissions required to produce more virgin material.
The systems are far from perfect but articles like this will prevent legitimate public support for necessary change. We all should be working hard to solve for every pathway of this complicated problem by improving what reuse looks like in our economy, further modernizing recycling and organics systems, improving landfill engineering and methane capture, and extracting far, far less in the first place.
Some good points here, but the author is astonishingly silent on the impact of environmental plastics on human health. Not to mention the natural world. Energetics are important, but they are at best only half the story of plastics today. Looking forward to the sequel.
I think most people in the West recycle today because it makes them feel good about themselves. The sense of contributing to the well being of others is sorely lacking in contemporary culture, and this is a cheap - and economically unproductive - of feeling useful.
Just like posting comments on the internet.
This important article sadly side-steps the root cause of all our issues: the blind, foolhardy and ruthless usage of Earth’s resources. We in the Western world need to simplify our lifestyles—merely so the rest of the world can live.
Americans make up 4.5% of the world’s population yet consume 25% of its resources: clearly this is unjust. We need to pursue degrowth as individuals, and if we cannot, rationing becomes essential public policy at a time when almost all life on Earth is on the lip of collapse, if not extinction, due to manmade climate disruption.
Your comment is quite possibly the most poorly thought out comment that I have read on the internet all year. We use the planets energy and resources to advance the prosperity and quality of life of humanity. If this is a bad thing to you, then you are declaring something about your values which should cause you to reconsider your world view.
There is nothing unjust about creating more value for ourselves by converting resources and energy into human flourishing. The “problem” is not with those creating prosperity, it is instead that so many haven’t been able to follow our example.
Climate change is certainly a concern (a negative externality of prosperity). But it is minor compared to the costs of poverty and poor health. Certainly it is something we can address, and probably already would have if idiotic environmentalists hadn’t derailed nuclear energy 50 years ago.
If you want to pursue degrowth, please feel free to do so on a personal level. But I have a better suggestion… why don’t you actually start to regularly read “Works In Progress” so that you aren’t so dangerously uninformed?
It's always people with phd at the end of their name on the Internet with the most doctrinaire and ignorant commentary, unfortunately.
It's not for nothing that "PhD" so often means "Piled higher and Deeper" (a pleasing complement to the article's title).
hey doc, what happens to all those resources after we yanks use them up? If we used up a quarter of the world’s resources every year, we would have run out a long time ago. Since population will soon start declining rapidly, it’s doubtful humanity has enough time to harm the climate before making themselves, let alone all other life, extinct.
Americans employ twenty-five percent of resources used worldwide, with the US military responsible for releasing ~5% of all green-house gases. Greed knows no bounds and is the greatest cause of poverty, injustice, ecocide, and violence worldwide.
Got to love this vague reference to 'resources'. Like evil sci-fi aliens harvesting 'resources' from victim planets.
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?
Does recycling plastic produce more or less microplastic to the environment than sealing it in a landfill? If a forever chemical is actually permanent (hence the name) it obviously cannot be recycled and sealing it in an impermeable landfill is a good thing to do with it.
Forever chemicals or PFAS are only added to certain plastics/plastic coatings. Items with these are probably better in the landfkll than recycled, but using metal or ceramic or glass other materials avoids the use of PFAS entirely, which is much preferrable. We also need to limit PFAS in plastic production as well, but until that happens you're better off avoiding them.
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.
Not following the logic. Why is single use buried material worse than a higher cost, more energy demanding multi use biodegradable one?
As a cotton bag user, it’s because the energy cost was never a factor. People dislike using plastic bags because they don’t want to put them into landfill where they will last for millions of years or whatever. Admittedly, this article does a lot to dispel those anxieties, but it’s fair to say that the energy cost of plastics has never been a huge concern for most people.