Schmidt-Pathmann believes it’s in Benton County’s best interest to consider the long-term costs — both monetary and nonmonetary — of hosting Coffin Butte. Long after that landfill runs out of space, it will need to be managed. “You will have to maintain a landfill forever. It’s like taking a loan from the bank without ever planning to pay it back,” Schmidt-Pathmann said. “At some point, the bank — or the environment — will come collecting.”
Americans support recycling. We do too. But although some materials can be effectively recycled and safely made from recycled content, plastics cannot. Plastic recycling does not work and will never work. The United States in 2021 had a dismal recycling rate of about 5 percent for post-consumer plastic waste, down from a high of 9.5 percent in 2014, when the U.S. exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled—even though much of it wasn’t.
Recycling in general can be an effective way to reclaim natural material resources. The U.S.’s high recycling rate of paper, 68 percent, proves this point. The problem with recycling plastic lies not with the concept or process but with the material itself.
WASHINGTON, May 4 (Reuters) – The rate of plastic waste recycling in the United States fell to between 5%-6% in 2021 as some countries stopped accepting U.S. waste exports and as plastic waste generation surged to new highs, according to a report released on Wednesday.
Microplastic pollution has been discovered lodged deep in the lungs of living people for the first time. The particles were found in almost all the samples analysed.
The scientists said microplastic pollution was now ubiquitous across the planet, making human exposure unavoidable and meaning “there is an increasing concern regarding the hazards” to health.
Samples were taken from tissue removed from 13 patients undergoing surgery and microplastics were found in 11 cases. The most common particles were polypropylene, used in plastic packaging and pipes, and PET, used in bottles. Two previous studies had found microplastics at similarly high rates in lung tissue taken during autopsies.
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Advocates of sustainable energy and waste management have been critical of the King County Solid Waste Division’s apparent push to expand the landfill. In September 2021, the Institute for Energy and Resource Management issued a public statement calling the King County Solid Waste Division’s environmental impact statement a “boondoogle,” and accusing the county of “going through the motions but having the conclusion decided well before hand.”
President of the Institute for Energy and Resource Management, Philipp Schmidt-Pathmann, has been increasingly vocal in his criticism of the King County Solid Waste Division and what he believes has been a lack of investment in recycling infrastructure and systems improvements. He cited stagnate rates of recycling in the region over the years.
Schmidt-Pathmann also has expressed his disbelief in the county’s studies, which claim the possibility of high rates of methane recapture from the landfill. Schmidt-Pathmann believes that the county has overinflated the rates of methane that can be captured as a way of making a landfill look like a more viable and sustainable waste management method than he believes it truly is.
He expressed his skepticism regarding the county’s reported rates of methane capture in a letter to the director of the King County Solid Waste Division in November of 2021.
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“For many years I’ve been working in the field of toxic waste, toxicology, cancer, infectious diseases, and it always leads into the business of sewage sludge and other forms of toxic waste,” he said.
Last week, Honour spoke of the dangers in human sludge, especially from patients treated with chemo, a drug designed to kill human cells, as well as hospital wastes, bacteria, viruses, dioxins, PCBs, asbestos, industrial waste, heavy metals and other hazards.
“For some reason, in Washington state, we live under the delusion that growing our food in extremely toxic waste is good news and is beneficial to the economy because farmers get a break from buying very expensive commercial fertilizers,” Honour said. “But the costs to us in our county and our state are extraordinary.”
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One sensitivity explored the comparison of adopting a 20 vs a 100-year time horizon. This clearly highlighted the large impact of methane emissions from landfills, in accordance with the recent IPCC report’s emphasis on the urgency to reduce GHG-emissions.
Another sensitivity investigated the CO2eq savings by energy recovery. The average electricity and heat mix of the European grid (and its evolution with a higher penetration of renewables in the future) is considered as default assumption for energy substitution. A sensitivity analysis with a marginal approach has also been developed which means that processes which recover energy from waste avoid the most carbon intensive conventional power generation technologies – fossil fuel sources. This sensitivity highlights even more the great contributions of energy recovery from waste in a decarbonisation perspective.
The waste management industry has cross-industrial interlinkages by making valuable waste-derived content available to the whole economy as secondary resources for material and energy uses.
– The EPA has stated it believes estimates of methane emissions from landfills may be twice as high as models indicate. While the landfill industry might disagree, numerous field studies have found that methane emissions are actually much higher than estimated. A 2016 study by Germany’s Institute for Energy and Environmental Research identified that landfill operators’ claims of methane recovery left out substantial amounts of emissions.
-Waste management companies are no longer just local contractors and the largest landfill operators are now national publicly traded companies. Substantial sums have been spent at the federal and state level by the waste management industry to influence the development and implementation of regulations. It is clear that waste companies have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and are willing to spend to do so.
-As more and more people come to realize the urgency of the climate crisis and the need for real and significant action, the U.S. must follow suit. As European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said before the opening of the COP26 conference in Glasgow, now comes the “moment of truth” that will affect the “survival of mankind.”
