What is the reason a lot of stuff dumped in landfills cannot be processed?

Question

All the crap we dump in landfills all over the planet is poluting the environment in one way of another. And this stuff can be processed at a very low cost into raw material if you think about it. So, the only rational I see for using landfills at all is no one thinks about the costs involved. Lets do a study and see how much can be gained by processing trash into raw material. Just the hydrocarbons that can be removed by processing are worth billions of euros or dollars. And the rest can be processed into raw material worth millions so why use the poluting landfill?

Answer 1

The idea behind recycling is to begin the sorting process earlier in the trash collection stream, saving the cost of later sorting when it has become less easy to do so. Computers and electronic parts are a case in point. Such e-refuse is actually a higher grade "ore" of valuable metals like gold. Aluminum is another such instance, costing far less to reprocess aluminum from trash than from the ground.

Unfortunately, much of trash is still non-competitive with original sources, as for example plastics in general. It's still cheaper to produce polyethylene, for example, from crude than from trash, because polyethylene cannot "go back into the melt" as metals can. Consequently, new uses have to be found for such non-competitive "commodies", and that's where the challenge lies in the marketplace. We have already recycling programs throughout the world, and yet much of the sorted out trash ends up in landfills anyway, because nobody has found a profitable need for such "commodies".

Not yet anyway. I agree with you that people should start looking at trash more as a raw source of materials, rather than something that requires taxation and subsidies to "dispose of nicely". The planet Earth is a huge place, why don't we just dump the stuff somewhere and forget about it? Because we are better than that, we used to have open sewers in the streets, we used to pollute the air we breathe much more than we used to, we will recycle the trash and make much more efficient use of our resources, because we're not slobs, and leave a stinking mess for future generations. We're better than that.

Answer 2

Recycling continually is smart. the actual incontrovertible truth that we've better costs for most of the products that we use could make a contribution to a urgency to recycle, although the unhappy reality of the count is that no longer adequate human beings do it to make it fesable on your trouble-free customer to do. maximum human beings ought to pay extra to have a waste corporation %. up recyclables seprately from wide-spread refuse. From an economic perspective the in common words one which will with no doubt earnings from our recycling is the producer no longer the buyer. We get it coming and going. It does although make experience to do and we could detect a fashion to get law exceeded that makes it a criminal offense to fee someone two times for a product (once to purchase the object and once to recycle the field.) so as that extra human beings will recycle.

Answer 3

it's an issue of sorting. And picking up. How do you get a poulation willing to sort all garbage and put up with paced pickup of certain types. To have one truck that can pick up crush and store all types is kind of expensive. If it were a good plan someone would be making a killing already. Some day it will be viable. Probaly when we have enough impovershed people to pick through mountains of garbage to bring to recyclers.