Fatih ÜNAl

Throwing rubbish in a landfill is (usually) better for the environment than recycling it. With few exceptions, recycling ends up emitting more CO2 and costing more money, while landfills are cheap and secure. - Recycling mid-tier plastics (like plastic bottles or butter tubs) costs thousands of dollars per ton of CO2 saved. It's cheaper to do direct air CO2 capture than that! And there is no shortage of plastic, nor any problem with sequestering it in the ground once we're done with it. - Modern landfills are extraordinarily secure and are *much* more than just big piles of trash. They capture 75%–95% of methane gas. Groundwater contamination is doesn't really happen with landfills built since 1990. A study of 31 landfills built since 1988 in NY found no adverse effect at all on local groundwater quality. - The crusade against single-use plastics has driven us to products that use far more materials and energy and would need to be used an absurd number of times to actually be an improvement. A steel straw needs to be used 150 times to be worth using. A ceramic mug needs to be used 1,000 times to beat a polystyrene cup. A cotton bag needs to be reused 173 times to beat single-use. - Some things ARE worth recycling. Recycling metal saves a huge amount of energy and material – recycling aluminium saves 95% of the energy spent on making fresh stuff. So we do a lot of it already: about 30% of steel worldwide is recycled. Modern, well-run landfills cause minimal environmental damage. We have plenty of space for them – less than 0.01% of the US is used for landfill and only about 0.02% of Germany. We can even build on top of old landfills, so the land area is not spent permanently. New in @WorksInProgMag, @robertwiblin and @chalmermagne on why it's usually best to just bury your trash. worksinprogress.co/issue/jus…