Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

Has anyone pointed out that large landfills full of plastic bottles and disposable diapers are a solution to global warming?

The irony is delicious. Environmentalists are opposed to trash that is nonbiodegradable. Ideally, they want trash to be recycled. As a second- best, they’d like it to be incinerated with scrubber smokestacks to make sure that pollutants don’t reach the air. Yet what is the effect of that? Recycling plastic means less demand for the oil from which it is made, lower gasoline prices, more oil being burned instead of turned into plastic, and hence more gasoline. Scrubber smokestacks make sure that the old plastic is efficiently and completely converted to carbon dioxide instead of more complicated chemicals.

To reduce the amount of carbon dioxide and reduce global warming, one has to make sure that carbon is converted into some inert form. Biodegradable wrapping won’t fit the bill— the bio’s that degrade it (bacteria, fungus, termites, whatever) turn it into carbon dioxide eventually. Plastic, on the other hand, does just fine, especially if you bury it deep enough in a landfill that sunlight can’t degrade it. Even if it isn’t buried, though, it’s better than something biodegradable.

So, every time you throw a pop bottle out of your car window onto the country lane, you’re helping stop global warming.

I’ll add an related point about recycling: I bet the benefits from it in terms of landfill expense saved are overstated. Landfills are expensive because of the need to avoid leakage of pollutants. Dirty diapers are one of the biggest problems, because we don’t want all that bacteria leaking out into the water supply. We don’t recycle diapers, though. What do we recycle? The parts of trash which aren’t poisonous— bottles, cans, and paper. Those products aren’t what create the landfill expense. In fact, if we separate them out, we could send them to a special, dirt-cheap, landfill that is just a big hole in the ground. No need for geological studies or special containment.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 5:59 am and is filed under Economics, Global Warming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.