What You Think About Landfill and Recycling Is Probably Totally Wrong

We aren’t anywhere near running out of space for landfill. The Earth is huge and we are good at digging deep holes. Space will never be a meaningful constraint.

We can already make plastic from plants and by then we’ll be much better at doing that. Most oil is used for fuel — just 4–8% goes towards making plastics anyway

Reusable straws and bags are often more resource intensive than single-use ones. Ever noticed that plastic bags and straws are both incredibly thin and incredibly cheap? Almost no resources go into making each one. It’s really kind of amazing.

If we bury metals, we can just mine more aluminium, tin, or iron — we’re not close to running out of any of these. But recycling metals is a good idea, as it’s cheaper and much more environmentally friendly than mining.

Analysing the total life-cycle cost of recycling vs making new items is very complicated and depends on the specific context.

Recycling can be worse for the environment too. By the time someone has picked up that plastic container of peanut butter, driven it to a recycling facility, separated it into its plastic type, taken off the lid, fully washed it out in hot water, and melted it down in a specialised facility, we might have used less energy and produced less pollutio... See more

Almost all of the litter that escapes into nature, especially the sea, comes from fishing ships or poorer riverine countries with bad rubbish collection practices, such as China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Rich countries like the UK or US have rubbish collection rates approaching 100% and are responsible for little new waste reaching the oceans... See more

By contrast, reusable metal straws and canvas bags require something like 10-100x the energy and materials to manufacture, and need regular cleaning so they don’t spread diseases. So unless you use them many times, they end up being worse for the environment.