[HN Gopher] Using satellites to uncover large methane emissions ...
___________________________________________________________________
Using satellites to uncover large methane emissions from landfills
Author : jacquesm
Score : 138 points
Date : 2022-08-11 08:56 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| kingkawn wrote:
| A city where a friend of mine lives harvests methane from a local
| dump and uses it to power ice rinks
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Harvesting methane from landfills sounds like a good idea but
| is it feasible and scalable in other places?
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > Harvesting methane from landfills sounds like a good idea
| but is it feasible and scalable in other places?
|
| It is with the right incentive(s), moreover, many landfills
| in the US are forced to have to install caps that require a
| substantial investment on the landfill municipality, which
| simply don't have the funds to do so.
|
| Vespene just closed on a $4 million [0] round, and are set to
| have a working prototype in CA this year: the business model
| is actually really elegant use of GHG without the need to
| install incredibly expensive infrastructure to send the power
| to the grid and can in turn use the same model that miners
| who have recaptured the flares from remote Oil and Gas
| refiners and convert waste CH4 into C02, which is more stable
| GHG but can also be further recaptured once an auxiliary
| purpose is found--greenhouse prototypes have been a thing
| that many miners have experimented with and something like
| genetic research-grade hemp products could be the solution.
|
| When people on HN complain about how little is being done by
| tech to offset GHG and subsequent climate change [1] they
| should really just be looking at themselves and where they
| work, because as a staunch environmentalist I can't think of
| a single form of non-research based tech in renewables that
| has incentivized so many to invest and build recapturing
| systems via it's economic incentive--be it relocating miners
| to capture excess hydro in China, to now this.
|
| The model is based on incentives and inducements, which as
| we've seen in the 13 years is the only viable option, and
| we're now getting to a matured incentives model (after lots
| of failures) and as this scales we will reach an inducement
| model where it is the only sound strategy to offset landfill
| expenses, reduce damaging release of GHG, and comply with
| environmental standards that should have been in place all
| along, but are only possible now after the Climate Bill.
|
| Honestly, people here are so opposing of something they
| didn't get to reap wild benefits from and dismiss it entirely
| to their own detriment because if they really cared about
| what is discussed in the most recent heatwave thread they'd
| be capable of looking beyond their own biases and see a much
| more viable network to bring about effective solutions
| towards climate change.
|
| 0: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/08/09/a-renewable-
| ene...
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32396651
| throwaway48294 wrote:
| The city I live in does something like this too! I thought it
| was pretty cool: https://www.wakegov.com/departments-
| government/waste-recycli...
|
| > The Landfill Gas-to-Energy facility is currently producing
| +-8.5 Megawatts of continuous power. 8.5 Megawatts of
| electricity can power a minimum of 8,500 homes during peak
| demand and about 17,000 homes off peak.
| aaron695 wrote:
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| I know that it is a polarising topic but it is possible to
| capture this methane and convert it into Bitcoin for a profit.[0]
|
| [0] https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/turning-garbage-
| into-...
| janandonly wrote:
| This is a great option because it helps small and poor
| municipalities to retrieve the initial cost of setup up a
| Methane based power plant.
|
| After some x years of BTC mining, the initial investment is
| fully paid back. Afterwards, they can choose to continue mining
| BTC or simply hook up the power plant to the electricity grid.
|
| A classic win-win.
| zwirbl wrote:
| You could also use the generated electricity for something more
| useful
| nuccy wrote:
| /sarcasm Or you can just burn it like Russia does [1] in
| enormous scales, just because they cannot stop gas production
| while reducing the transport to Europe to increase economic
| pressure.
|
| 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/wfxzjr/russia_is_
| no...
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| I still don't understand why Moscow doesn't look like Dubai
| with all the resources Russians have.
| redwood wrote:
| The national wealth is not reinvested and instead is
| extracted by kleptocrats and invested into places like
| Miami and Dubai..
|
| Honestly the bigger tragedy is that they're unable to put
| their brilliant population with wonderful education to
| use building a modern economy and instead put their minds
| in a vice, put them in prison, and force them to flee in
| droves. It's really a human tragedy
| cpursley wrote:
| Are you actually familiar with Russia (or just the
| Reddit/Twitter depiction of Russia)?
|
| For one, Russia has a lower prison population than the
| USA. And that's even with some absolutely ridiculous and
| archaic laws.
|
| Russian consumer and tech companies are on par or in many
| cases, surpass the US. Yandex Taxi (and their other
| services), Ozon, Wildberries, Kusvil (grocery), banking
| mobile apps, shipping/logistics services - these are just
| some examples.
| lazide wrote:
| Not the poster, but I know quite a few native Russians
| and their description of the corruption and looting
| matches the posters description.
| cpursley wrote:
| When was the last time they lived in Russia? That was
| true in the 90s and 2000's but things have changed
| drastically in the past 10 years.
| lazide wrote:
| About that time, but have family and friends in Moscow
| and used to visit regularly until the war. What they
| noted is had started to get better (albeit still with
| corruption and kleptocrats everywhere outside of the big
| Moscow foreign companies) then with the sanctions
| everything imploded again - but it was still pretty
| awful.
|
| They're pretty left leaning and the wife is in tech and
| had to leave because of the blatant discrimination/sexism
| against her though, so I'm sure that weighs heavily on
| her analysis.
| redwood wrote:
| I'm guessing you live in Moscow? the rest of the country
| is half way between a developing economy and a western
| state in terms of quality of living, and that's all on
| top of the fact that Russia is pursuing a violent war of
| aggression, by choice, against a large European-leaning
| neighbor.
| cpursley wrote:
| No, but I've spent time living in Russia (outside Moscow)
| and understand enough Russian to get by.
|
| A Russian friend of mine recently ordered a fresh avocado
| from the Delivery Club app and had it delivered to his
| front door within 15 mins. For like $2. And that's after
| 6 or 7 packages of sanctions and getting cut off from
| SWIFT.
|
| Yep, sounds like a place that's dysfunctional and on the
| verge of collapsing...
| redwood wrote:
| Intimately familiar. The culture is so beaten down by
| totalitarianism that no one even feels comfortable
| speaking out even to their friends. All of the tech
| you're mentioning was built during a unique period of
| access to western technology that is now going to be
| harder and harder to get. You're hitting the nail on the
| head that during that period it was the perfect moment
| for Russia to change and it was what the west was betting
| on. The tragedy is that without institutions to nurture
| an open society Russia became a totalitarian state yet
| again and that has now gone beyond oppressing its own
| people into living in squalor by western standards and
| now into violently attempting to destroy a large western
| leaning country: we're seeing a nightmare play out.
| cpursley wrote:
| > Intimately familiar
|
| So you're Russian or spent time living there?
|
| Have you visited in the past 5 years or so?
| cpursley wrote:
| You can't really compare the two as one was a greenfield
| top-down project while the other is an old already built-
| out and developed city.
|
| And have you been to Moscow lately?
|
| Current situation aside, Moscow is easily one of the
| cleanest and most well functioning cities in Europe.
| There's plenty of construction and a lot of renovation.
| They recently completed their second ring metro line
| (second!) complete with beautiful and unique stations:
|
| https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/12/08/moscow-metro-
| opens...
|
| It's actually shocking to land there after spending a
| couple days in NYC. I'd (and many Russians) would argue
| that there's actually too much investment in Moscow and
| not enough outside of it.
|
| A lot of Westerns have an distorted understanding of what
| Moscow is actually like due to how it's (intentionally)
| depicted in Hollywood. If you want to get an idea of what
| Moscow feels like check YouTube for the "Lost in Moscow"
| channel and just scroll through a bunch of their videos.
| Here's an example:
|
| https://youtu.be/h6vpRtbuJfM
| richiebful1 wrote:
| Agreed. As an American who lived in Moscow, I would
| consider retiring there if Russia wasn't actively hostile
| to the West. Excellent public transit, much lower cost of
| living vs the United States, commuter train (electrichka)
| access to the countryside
| wongarsu wrote:
| The way Russia transitioned from Socialist to Capitalist
| was a bit of a mess. The widely accepted best practice
| was to sell state-owned companies to raise capital to
| operate the state. But Russia didn't want to sell to
| Western countries for obvious reasons, and citizens from
| the former Soviet Union weren't well equipped to pay fair
| prizes. So companies more or less went for pennies to
| those who could call in the most favors, cementing the
| corruption that already plagued the USSR.
|
| Of course there are also other factors, like Russia
| spending a bunch on things that it deems strategically
| necessary, but that don't result in immediate money flows
| (like subsidizing cites beyond the Ural).
| moffkalast wrote:
| That is really both hilarious and depressing.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Burning it is better than venting it unburned, which is
| still subsidized in the US (though some recent, bipartisann
| EPA changes will hopefully reduce this).
|
| Russia also leaks lots of it unburned too, which new
| satellite tech will be able to track, so hopefully there
| will be a global improvement on this front with well
| regulated oil and gas production being carbon taxed less
| than irresponsible production.
|
| An easy win, once you can confront people with irrefutable
| evidence, but sad it takes that do something so simple.
| moonchrome wrote:
| Russia should generate bitcoin with that. And people say
| blockchain isn't a solution for everything.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Hm, now I wonder. Would that actually make sense for
| them? They'd have the hardware costs upfront, but could
| then actually use the gas instead of just burning it. Or
| do they not have enough gas power plants to use all that
| excess gas? Anyone with background information and/or
| some napkin math? ;)
| misja111 wrote:
| Yeah this is exactly what the world needs.
|
| Finally we have a killer use case for Bitcoin: allow
| Russia to circumvent Western European sanctions by
| burning fossil fuels and generating money to buy weapons
| for their war in Ukraine.
| moonchrome wrote:
| Nvidia would be all for it if it involved ETH.
| greggsy wrote:
| I hadn't considered the momentum of outflows across the gas
| supply chain. Interesting.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| I.e. just pipe it to a genset and just contribute to the
| local power grid.
| sharperguy wrote:
| The issue is that in the majority locations, the amount of
| energy to be recaptured is too low, and the location of the
| landfill is too remote to justify building the infrastucture
| to distribute it. With bitcoin mining, the energy can be used
| on-site.
| leetnewb wrote:
| There are many landfill gas projects operating in the US - see
| https://www.epa.gov/lmop/project-and-landfill-data-state
| janandonly wrote:
| Ted Cruz seems to agree on that: Ted Cruz Says
| Bitcoin Mining Can Fix Texas' Crumbling Electric Grid.
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg8yj8/ted-cruz-says-bitcoin...
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > Ted Cruz seems to agree on that:
|
| Honestly, even as an optimistic Bitcoiner that is too much of
| a stretch; Texas' electricity grid is a nightmare of Enron
| proportions, and at best Bitcoin can provide stabilizers to
| the grid to offset some unnecessary expenses and turn off
| it's mining operations when the grid becomes overwhelemed by
| demand, what is really needed there is much more than what
| BTC can provide.
|
| It's use and investment into Wind is laudable, but what is
| needed as complete overhaul of how ERCOT does business, and I
| honestly doubt a corrupt politician like Ted Cruz (or anyone
| else from that state) will actually do anything about that as
| he will just go to Mexico when the grid fails... again.
|
| I said Texas was a bad place to relocate those miners after
| China banned it, and yet it still provides a significant
| amount of the hashing power proving the point that it cannot
| be banned, and even more showed up after the uprising
| situation in Kazakhstan earlier this year--El Salvador or
| Tonga could have used them, or even Iceland would have been a
| better choice. And still it went ahead and mining operations
| were backed by tech 'luminaries' like Peter Thiel, which were
| followed by continuous winter and summer based outages and
| blackouts, proving that just coaxing something as energy
| demanding as BTC is far more complex than just shoe-horning
| something that sounds 'green.'
| mistrial9 wrote:
| MethanSAT project description
|
| https://www.methanesat.org/2021/06/28/edf-announces-satellit...
| karol wrote:
| Why bother with mini farts when there are far larger methane
| leaks? https://www.ecowatch.com/methane-leak-russia-coal-
| mine.html A clear case of over-focusing on the problem.
|
| Should I applaud that in a few years we will be able to visualise
| individual animals' methane emissions when clearly this follows a
| Pareto distribution and shutting down the largest offenders will
| have the greatest impact.
|
| Instead it seems we want to congratulate ourselves again that we
| created more data points about our methane-guilt. It is clear to
| me that if this kind of tech can be used to slap fines on people
| it will. And so we can create new markets for allowable methane
| emissions!
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| That was the same satellite source that was used in this paper.
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/ghgsat/status/1537051266127482880
|
| https://www.ghgsat.com/en/case-studies/coal-mining-methane/
|
| So now they have the data they should only look at Russian coal
| mines?
| DFHippie wrote:
| Why not do what we can rather than shake our fists at greater
| problems we cannot address?
|
| We fine people for littering even though there are also
| murders.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| See also https://www.methanesat.org/
| franksvalli wrote:
| Woot, thanks for the plug! I work at MethaneSAT with a bunch of
| smart folks trying to make this happen (have to also say we're
| hiring ;)).
| defrost wrote:
| Nitrous Oxide from Nitrogen fertilizedrs applied to broadacre
| grains is another gas being watched and thought about:
|
| > In broadacre cropping, fertiliser production and use accounted
| for 58 per cent of the Australian wheat crop's greenhouse gas
| footprint in the past five years, according to the Department of
| Agriculture.
|
| > Of that, 31 per cent occurred on-farm, a large part of which
| came through the volatilisation of nitrogen fertiliser, where
| nitrous oxide is released into the atmosphere.
|
| > Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas that is almost 300 times more
| potent than carbon dioxide.
|
| There are mitigating strategies, in principle the most appealing
| would be legume crop rotation, however:
|
| > "I guess naturally the go-to option is to grow more legumes in
| the rotation, because when we grow legumes we don't need to apply
| nitrogen to meet production," he said.
|
| > "But it's not as simple as that, because there are greenhouse
| gas emissions such as nitrous oxide associated with the breakdown
| of legume stubbles."
|
| so that needs quantification and further study.
|
| Other approaches are discussed:
|
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-11/grain-industry-push-t...
| greggsy wrote:
| You can see N2O emissions as a layer in Null School [1], which
| clearly shows the tracks left by aircraft.
|
| https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/chem/surface/level/ani...
| philipkglass wrote:
| That's NO2, nitrogen dioxide. It contributes to acid rain but
| not to global warming:
| https://www.epa.gov/no2-pollution/basic-information-about-
| no...
|
| Unless you already _know_ this fact it 's hard to search for,
| though. Even with an exact-quotes Google search for "nitrogen
| dioxide" "global warming potential", Google shows me an info
| snippet for N2O, nitrous oxide.
| defrost wrote:
| Cheers for that link, it's a really nice little layered GIS
| globe :-)
| pfdietz wrote:
| There are also denitrification inhibitors. Some are even
| natural (procyanidins and others). I can imagine growing crops
| engineered to produce and release these.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7466050/
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Here is a cool infograph to put the methane budget in context:
|
| https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/12/1561/2020/essd-12-15...
|
| One question I raise is how much of the methane leaks related to
| oil & gas activity also include accurate data on abandoned
| oil/gas wells?
|
| The method described in the paper should perhaps in the future
| confirm the accuracy of the current estimates.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Every time we get better instrumentation and revise that data,
| the share of emission from fossil fuel handling explodes. I can
| only imagine it will keep growing until we have satellite
| surveys of all sources on the entire world.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Yes, current data for most of these things are estimates based
| on complicated extrapolations.
|
| Being able to measure them more accurately, particularly in
| countries that don't publish any reliable information is going
| to be interesting.
|
| As far as I'm aware the current new info is generally
| summarized as "worse than we expected" since overestimates
| (i.e. accurate estimates) would get heavy pushback without
| solid data to justify them.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Note this is just further, more detailed confirmation of stuff we
| already knew for a long time.
|
| This is why landfill is, and always has been, near the bottom of
| the waste hierarchy, below even incineration with energy
| recovery.
|
| People who sell fossil fuels have regularly argued that we should
| just bury trash and have lots of silly arguments as to why that
| is the case.
|
| But the various recycling schemes used in EU, Singapore etc. are
| clearly better on basically every metric which isn't "sales of
| fossil fuels".
|
| For the methane issue, seperate recycling of food, agricultural
| and other organic waste into biogas and fertilizer is the obvious
| solution. GHG negative methane!
|
| Germany is a world leader in this, but even they can do more.
|
| https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-technology-busines...
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Methane goes away after 20 years. Carbon Dioxide stays around
| for thousands of years. We should spend 100% of our resources
| transitioning to extremely cheap sustainable electric energy.
|
| That is the only option for turning the tide on climate
| bognition wrote:
| Not sure what you are arguing when you say methane "goes
| away". It does not disappear, it reacts with oxygen in the
| atmosphere to become becomes carbon dioxide and water.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| It becomes much less of a greenhouse gas, does that make
| more sense?
| irishsultan wrote:
| Your original statement was that carbon dioxide stays for
| thousands of years, methane goes away after twenty.
|
| So the fact that "going away" in this context means "is
| replaced by carbon dioxide, which stays for thousands of
| years" seems a rather important part of the total warming
| potential of the two greenhouse gasses.
| thatcat wrote:
| No
| boredemployee wrote:
| and what about everything else, from farting cows and crazy
| vulcans?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| It's burps, not farts.
|
| We will almost certainly soon be able to track cattle based
| emissions via satellite and use that to enforce usage of
| the various solutions we have (seaweed based food
| supplements apparently work) and/or price in the
| externality.
|
| Here's some work on that from the same info source used for
| the above:
|
| https://www.ghgsat.com/en/newsroom/cow-burps-seen-from-
| space...
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| And the fugitive methane from fracking? Or will we just
| blame the farm that was fracked under without consent
| which had its bore water ruined?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I agree with your second statement but your first is a bit
| ambigous.
|
| Methane is a much more potent GHG than Carbon (about 8-30x),
| and is a big chunk of the emissions (about 20%).
|
| In fact after 20 years of being worse than carbon dioxide, it
| mostly turns into carbon dioxide and then hangs around for
| millenia, meaning it is categorically worse.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >it mostly turns into carbon dioxide and then hangs around
| for millenia, meaning it is categorically worse.
|
| This too is inaccurate. CO2 has a half-life in the
| atmosphere variously stated between 27 and 49 years.
|
| If the world magically went zero Co2 today, The atmospheric
| levels would decrease about 2.5%/yr
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 1000 years is definately a figure I've seen bandied about
| by NASA, and the Bern model suggests that some percentage
| is effectively permanent, so millenia doesn't seem
| outlandish.
|
| Where are you citing your numbers from?
|
| A quick Google suggests it's a Climate Change Denial
| source:
|
| http://euanmearns.com/the-half-life-of-co2-in-earths-
| atmosph...
|
| And even they cite the climate scientists as saying
| hundreds of years (before going on to prove them wrong in
| their blog post of course):
|
| > We hear all the time form the climate science community
| that even if we stop burning fossil fuels (FF) today the
| CO2 we have already produced will still be in the
| atmosphere for centuries to come. We have already lit a
| long slow burning fuse that will lead us to climate
| Armageddon. How much of this is actually true?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| You can find the numbers in the IPCC reports.
|
| Headline numbers like 1,000s of years are are always
| talking about about a fraction of emitted CO2.
|
| Like radiation, CO2 Decay has an infinite tail. When it
| is "gone" depends on how much you are talking about (50%,
| 90%, 99.9% ect)
|
| CO2 decay is complicated because there are several
| removal pathways, and some cap out, and some keep going.
|
| The IPCC doesn't talk about it in terms of half-life
| because it isn't true exponential decay. The 2007 Report
| said the following:
|
| "Carbon dioxide cycles between the atmosphere, oceans and
| land biosphere. Its removal from the atmosphere involves
| a range of processes with different time scales. About
| 50% of a CO2 increase will be removed from the atmosphere
| within 30 years, and a further 30% will be removed within
| a few centuries. The remaining 20% may stay in the
| atmosphere for many thousands of years" * More recent
| reports essentially provide an asterisk that says _its
| complicated_.
|
| https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar4-wg1-c
| hap...
| adrianN wrote:
| The carbon cycle is complex and simple half life numbers
| are always wrong. A lot of the carbon we emit is removed
| from the atmosphere relatively quickly, for example into
| the biosphere or into the oceans. But the only way to
| "permanently" get rid of it is by sequestering it into
| the lithosphere. These processes take geological time.
| Until they are complete the equilibrium concentration in
| the atmosphere is larger than before we burned that piece
| of coal. So it is relatively accurate that _some_ of the
| carbon we emit stays in the atmosphere "forever".
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I completely agree. Certainly you would also agree that
| the following statement is misleading at best.
|
| >it mostly turns into carbon dioxide and then hangs
| around for millenia, meaning it is categorically worse.
| snewman wrote:
| Transitioning to sustainable electricity is necessary but not
| sufficient, we also need to address methane, cement and steel
| production, and a bunch of other things. Regarding the
| urgency of methane in particular:
| https://climateer.substack.com/p/aerosols
| adrianN wrote:
| The people involved in recycling infrastructure are usually
| not qualified to build wind turbines or electrolyzers, so I
| think we can safely do 100% of both.
| onion2k wrote:
| It's also useful though. Capturing it means we can use it.
| skybrian wrote:
| I believe some landfills burn off the methane? I wonder how
| effective that is.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| It's relatively common to capture it and use it in places
| where air pollution is taken serioisly (it also avoids the
| occaisiobal ecplosion). Definately worth doing if the
| landfill already exists, but much easier to keep the organic
| material seperate in the first place.
|
| It's one of the remedies the paper mentions for the sites
| they identified
| mrpopo wrote:
| Korea is another great example in recycling food waste. The
| country's food culture historically created a lot of food waste
| (although the total food waste had been reducing lately), and
| being a limited territory like Singapore, they recycle
| everything they can. Separating food waste is mandatory and you
| can get fined for not doing it. They use the recovered food
| waste as pig feed, compost and bio-gas.
|
| https://earth.org/food-waste-south-korea/
| rob74 wrote:
| Feeding pigs with food waste has a long tradition of course,
| in Eastern Europe many rural households still have one or two
| pigs just for this purpose, but in 2006 the EU banned that
| for commercial pig farming after outbreaks of Foot and Mouth
| Disease...
| mrpopo wrote:
| I didn't know about that. For me this is also an ethical
| issue. Raising a household pig and feeding it your own food
| waste and leftovers is fine, but when done on an industrial
| scale, for commercial purposes, we are bound to see regular
| abuse, possibly with sanitary consequences.
| thfuran wrote:
| Why do you think that pigs fed on food waste are more
| likely to be abused than pigs fed other feed?
| cumshitpiss wrote:
| There are a lot of extras that appear happen in food
| waste i.e., plastics, paper etc.
|
| In industrial settings this is not easy to filter out, so
| pigs end up consuming more of these non food waste
| products more than they would in small farms or feed-fed
| pigs.
|
| There are many articles on the practice of hog garbage
| feeding recently
| hulitu wrote:
| Composting of organic matter is not used for biogas and the
| plastic, when not sent to other countries, is burned. A lot of
| big cities have a "MVA".
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I don't know what you are trying to say.
|
| Organic matter is used to generate biogas and other useful
| things all over the world.
|
| https://www.epa.gov/anaerobic-digestion/types-anaerobic-
| dige...
|
| Burning plastic is, as I mentioned in my post, better than
| landfill if you use the energy for something and displace
| fossil fuels.
|
| We don't really need to do that for much longer, since
| renewables are so cheap, so recycling is getting to be a
| better and better option and has been a good option for
| decades now.
|
| Landfill has always been a last resort.
|
| edit: figured out that with the reference to MVA you might
| have been saying that the US recycled too. They do, they
| don't do as much as they could and should because there's a
| lot of disinformation about it, but yes it's so obviously a
| good idea that even the US does it.
|
| What I meant with reference to non US places was: recycle
| more and more stuff, don't moan and lie about it all the
| time, be an industrial leader not merely allow the US to get
| dragged kicking and screaming into saving money and improving
| people's health against the will of half the nation.
| atwood22 wrote:
| Burning plastic is only good if you capture the released
| CO2. Otherwise, I have a hard time imagining plastic is a
| more efficient fuel than most fossil fuels, meaning you
| release more CO2 for the same result when burning plastic.
| noselasd wrote:
| You can either pull oil out of the ground, make plastic
| of it and bury that plastic, where the decomposition will
| release greenhouse gases. Or you can burn it and capture
| the energy.
|
| The difference in greenhouse gases isn't big - provided
| you burn it properly.
|
| Except if burning the plastic is a replaceement for
| buring other kinds of fossil fie, in which case it's a
| win vs burying it.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| To be clear, if what you have is just plastic, you should
| really be recycling it. If it's mixed solid waste and
| it's too late for that then...
|
| > According to the Environmental Protection Agency,
| burning municipal solid waste emits nearly as much carbon
| per unit of energy as coal, and almost twice as much as
| natural gas.
|
| And while gas is definately better than coal (due to
| burning clean, cheap to build, fast ramping) many
| estimates of methane leakage in the fossil fuel
| extraction process mean it could be (depending on how and
| where you source it) more than double the GHG impact than
| just the burn itself.
|
| For me, the extra money diverted from the fossil fuel
| industry tips it in burnings direction, as long as
| sufficient effort is made to scrub the exhaust gas of
| toxins and if recycling wasn't clearly better.
|
| Which it is. So we should do that instead.
|
| I just see a lot of people saying it's worse than
| landfill, which it isn't.
| ErikCorry wrote:
| Agreed. In addition I think people overestimate the CO2
| produced by burning plastic. A plastic shopping bag is
| 6-8 grammes. Burning it produces about as much CO2 as
| driving a car 200 yards. If you pick a supermarket one
| mile further from your house because they have a better
| policy on plastic bags then the environment loses.
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