This is what he means by "externality". The disposable plastic garbage isn't really the cheapest option. It's just that the real cost of all the garbage isn't priced in at market.
Remind me again why the 'real cost' of plastic is higher than all the other garbage we put into landfill?
I know there is something going on with microplastics or somesuch that I'm not up to date on, but I would have thought that sealing it in a big hole in the ground would be cheap, effective and safe.
A life cycle analysis might hypothetically conclude that landfills are a perfectly sustainable solution to plastic. Unfortunately a lot of this stuff makes it into the ocean instead where it will not biodegrade and will interfere with fisheries and ecosystems. Properly structured economic incentives and laws could solve this problem, as they have solved many problems in the past.
How much waste is making it from a landfill to the GPGP? I'd bet about 0% in the West. Studies have shown that most of the waste in the GPGP is from rivers in Asia.
In my town, it'd be cheaper/better for the environment to landfill all the waste instead of sending it overseas to be "recycled." Our city recently prohibited placing cardboard in the trash. Something I would have thought is easily broken down...
Cardboard is one of the most valuable recyclables.
Additionally, landfills are expensive to build and run so some municipalities are pushing recycling, composting, etc as a cost saving measure. Less trash into landfill, the longer until we have to build a new one.
In the anaerobic environment of a landfill paper takes an extremely long time to break down. There have been excavations of landfills where they found 60 year old newspapers that were still readable. There was so little oxygen in the pile, the process of breaking down the starches, cellulose and ink was taking place with inefficient anaerobic processes rather than much more efficient aerobic processes.
Long story short, a landfill is not the same as a compost heap. Compost heaps are routinely turned over and disturbed to ensure that oxygen permeates through to the core of the heap. A landfill, on the other hand, is explicitly designed not to do that, in order to contain potentially hazardous materials that may leach out of the waste contained therein.
Yeah, but ... most things in the earth's crust don't biodegrade. Sandstone doesn't really biodegrade, and we have a lot of sandstone near where I live. What makes plastic worse once it is covered with a layer of soil?
I guess I've never really thought about it from an unbiased perspective before. How bad are landfills if they are done in some sort of long-term strategy? You can cover over the landfill and make new land with it (many parks are basically this). But I worry about things like battery acid and other chemicals seeping into the water table or causing who knows what damage to the soil.
At least on its face if you're putting the plastic deep in the ground, from whence it came, maybe that's a decent intermediary solution.
But I would also agree with anyone who says its not sustainable. The amount of waste we produce seems a little insane compared to other creatures on the planet.
The Earth has 5-10 billion years left at most, whatever we do to it (unless we reach the point of being able to change its orbit). Less if we're unlucky and get hit by an asteroid etc.. So there's no such thing as truly sustainable, only "good enough".
Im not sure if you correctly understand what the word "sustainable" means. X is sustainable IFF you can keep doing X forever and not have it kill you eventually. "Seems to work" is perhaps a sub-optimal policy objective.
Pretty much every physical object we had started out underground and was mined by human or plant activity, except for the minerals that are synthesised directly from the air.
It isn't a hill I'm going to fight on, but 'land is a finite resource' has, to me, always meant arable farmland and prime coastal real estate. There is no actual shortage of land. At best, there might be a shortage of prime away-from-water-table-with-less-permeable-rock-surroundings sites that are ideal for landfill - but I doubt that is true.
For example, the deepest mine is about 4km deep, and about half the atmosphere is within 5km of the surface of the earth. Running out of landfill space in that sense is like running out of oxygen. The only limits are transport costs and making sure the landfill is either non-toxic or kept well away from water (which, economically speaking, might be a substantial limit but plastics are clearly quite inert, because we store food in them and they apparently don't degrade).
EDIT But the key point here is that these costs aren't externalities. The people paying for them are the consumers who are buying the plastic. If landfill costs go up, municipalities will start to charge more for waste disposal and consumers will favour products with less packaging.
It can still be the cheapest option even after pricing in the externality. A lot of people forget this, because they advocate such Pigovian taxes with the intent of stamping out the good, irrespective of the (edit: net) value it provides.
I very rarely see anyone come in with the attitude of: "Hey, burn all the gas you want once we have the appropriate carbon taxes!"
One problem with environmental degradation is that effects are often non-linear whereas taxes are typically linear. So "do all the X you want" is not the appropriate response if the tax is simply used as a lever to move behaviour in one direction.
On the other hand, if the government is selling emission rights then this can model non-linear effects. Then it makes sense to say, "go on, use your rights to the full extent."
If you won't quantify how bad the damage is and how much you'd need to erase it, and therefore what at what tax rate you'd be fine with someone consuming to their heart's content, then you think the cost is infinite and therefore have no business proposing policy to begin with.
"Someone consuming to their heart's content" is not bounded.
It seems to me you're arguing that just because a tax is a blunt tool it shouldn't be used at all. But tax rate doesn't have to be set in stone, it can be adjusted dynamically in a feedback loop.
No, I'm saying that advocates should be clear about what the precise harms are and that taxes should be used to ameliorate the harms of the taxed activity, and that anyone unable to put such numbers on it is not advocating a serious policy we should listen to.
This is what he means by "externality". The disposable plastic garbage isn't really the cheapest option. It's just that the real cost of all the garbage isn't priced in at market.