Comments by "" (@kaitlyn__L) on "Where Should Landfills Go? #TeamSeas" video.

  1. I’m remembering how 20 years ago I was told “well we obviously can’t keep doing that forever, but that’s okay because we’re always improving recycling”… as far as I can tell, the plastics which recycled easy 20 years ago still do and the ones which don’t still don’t :/ glass and metals recycling also by and large use processes that are very mature. Lead-acid batteries were the only majority-recycled battery 20 years ago and that’s still true today. Etc.
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  2. A lot of UK cities stopped collections for those at the start of covid and to my knowledge haven’t resumed :/ it’s a shame too because, as bad as CO2 is, methane is so much worse (and decays into CO2 anyway after a few decades of harm) that it’s literally better to burn it than release it.
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  3. Lots of trash isn’t strictly useless, it’s just cheaper to extract brand new resources. 🙄 There’s a lot of iron and aluminium sent to landfills for instance, not to mention copper, silver, gold, etc especially in throwaway electronics. I often wonder if some future civilisation is going to find buried old landfills, with the organics long decayed and the metals long turned into salts and other minerals, and wonder how exactly such a concentration of all these resources which don’t normally occur together happened.
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  4. That’s interesting about the ash for glass for road building. Are any precious metals in common landfill items filtered out beforehand, so it’s all hydrocarbons and organics? The UK definitely operates a lot of waste to energy nowadays but I’m not sure (TBH I doubt) if we’re doing it as carefully as you.
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  5.  @hape3862  neat :) there must be some organics too though right? Like food-soiled paper/paperboard/cardboard packaging (or increasingly, straws and spoons and so on). They can’t be run through the anaerobic digesters like food waste can, unless I’m mistaken.
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