this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023

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Disposing of a mattress is ridiculously hard. So is the wider struggle for waste sustainability (www.cbc.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by grte to c/canada

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

In some places, they burn the trash and make electricity out of it. I don't know what ends up being better, burning it or letting it seep everywhere?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It depends. I find a lot of Japan will burn plastic that isn't economically viable to be recycled, with a lot of effort spent on scrubbing the smoke of harmful chemicals. That seems to be better than other alternatives.

[–] nik282000 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

plastic that isn’t economically viable to be recycled

Almost no plastic is economically viable to recycle. Even when it can be done you can usually only put a few % into the new product before it fails to meet spec.

Surprisingly 'make less plastic' is the answer to 'we have too much plastic.'

Edit: Check out Climate Town's Awesome Video on plastic!

[–] BCsven 5 points 1 year ago

There is a total energy savings compared to making new plastic, but it is only like 10-20% less energy. But that is a better solution than jusy dumping into a landfill. And yeah a plastic plant recycling material for new plastic bottles is like 16-20% recycled and the rest new material, so you need to make 4 bottles at least to consume an old one, so it is an expanding pyramid of bottles required.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Surprisingly 'make less plastic' is the answer to 'we have too much plastic.'

but what about the plastic makers? /s

[–] LostWon 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Indeed. I remember where I lived in Japan it was specifically PET plastic only (and I'm pretty sure it wasn't even all forms of PET). That generally amounted to just plastic bottles for various beverages, only. Meanwhile lots of other types of plastic were in existence as well.

[–] rbos 5 points 1 year ago

Burning isn't the right word necessarily. Plasma gas plants disassociate stuff into constituent elements and produce nothing toxic. They're just expensive to start up and there aren't many.

[+] ultratiem 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

[deleted]

[–] hoot 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is terribly incorrect. Space is not a solution. The amount of energy required to send trash into space is very high and therefore expensive, like ~$5000/kg, and would generate a stupid amount of C02. Watch this video, it gives a great perspective on the scope of the problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us2Z-WC9rao

Alternatively, the Earth is HUGE. All the garbage ever generated in the history of humankind would fit into a comparatively tiny space. This is obviously a terrible option too, but WAY better than space.

Burning it is also terrible - no matter how good we get the incinerators, they still produce unacceptable levels of dioxins and other chemicals. You are much more likely to get cancer if you live near an incinerator.

The ONLY solution is to stop producing so much plastic.

[–] ramjambamalam 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Friendly reminder that Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is in order of priority.

We should require deposit-based packaging (like beer bottles) for most consumable goods.

[–] hoot 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I agree. We also need regulation that makes manufacturers responsible for the end costs of their packaging and products. This kind of thinking is starting to come around, as municipalities and taxpayers have finally started waking up to the fact that it's ultimately our dollars that are paying for the corporations to create as much waste as they want. We're the ones that have to pay for the garbage pickups and the landfills where it all ends up.

[–] Dearche 4 points 1 year ago

This. 90% of modern waste comes from excesses. Everything from kitchen waste to disposables and clothes. We build cheap crap and throw them out after one use all the time, rather than getting quality and enjoying their use for years.

There's a reason why fast fashion is considered one of the greatest sources of waste in the world.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://www.piped.video/watch?v=Us2Z-WC9rao

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

We just need to dig a deep enough hole in a subduction zone so it eventually turns into lava

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Throwing stuff at the sun is super hard to do, as well as the fact that this would be wasting precious resources that is now gone from earth. I feel like one day, there will be businesses mining old garbage patch for long lost metals and stuff.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Idk about where you live, but here you take it down to the dump and pay $35 to dispose of it if you can afford it. If you can't afford it you sneak behind a box store at night and dump it in their dumpster.

[–] cyberpunk007 3 points 1 year ago

I used to recycle so much more stuff then my local return it's just quit doing certain stuff like batteries and oil. So now what? This is the opposite direction of what we want.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

It's a grey, wet October day at the landfill in Greater Sudbury in northern Ontario, and the hazy conditions have attracted colonies of seagulls and eagles in search of food to the area.

Standing on top of some 30 years worth of garbage, landfill manager Aziz Rehman eyes a pile of mattresses waiting to be handled by the trucks that process incoming trash.

A business case for a mattress recycling program is before Greater Sudbury city councillors this year as they head into budget deliberations.

Like many of the smaller and more rural cities in Ontario, Greater Sudbury does not have enough of a population to sustain a viable private mattress recycling facility.

In a statement to CBC News, Gary Wheeler, a spokesperson for the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks, says there are no "currently defined timelines" for when its producer responsibility regulations might apply to mattresses.

Calvin Lakhan, a postdoctoral researcher and co-investigator of the Waste Wiki project at Toronto's York University, says the province is lagging behind on this because it does not consider mattresses to be a high waste-management priority.

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