Just bury your trash

Environmental classes teach that landfill is the last resort, the sad result of failed recycling. But reality may be the opposite: for most waste, landfill is actually greener and cheaper than recycling.

Are cotton bags really greener than plastic?

Plastic straws are reviled, but a steel straw uses 10 grams of steel versus 0.2 grams of plastic for a plastic one. A steel straw must be reused 150 times just to match the resource use of plastic, not counting the hot water for washing. Cotton bags are worse: they need 173 uses to beat plastic.

Recycling is a losing proposition

Recycling sounds simple, but it's surprisingly inefficient. About 25% of items in US recycling bins are contaminants, like lidded containers or wet paper. For mid-grade plastics (like butter tubs), recycling a ton costs an extra thousand dollars to save just 0.43 tons of CO2. Direct air capture, by contrast, costs $490 per ton.

Landfills aren't trash mountains anymore

Modern landfills are built on thick clay and plastic liners to prevent leachate from seeping into the soil, and pipes capture methane for power generation. Thirty-one modern landfills in New York operated for 445 years without affecting groundwater quality. Incineration costs more, and landfill uses just 0.01% of US land.

So tossing recyclables into the trash bin makes no difference to ocean pollution—unless you live in a low-income country. Instead of spending more on recycling, we could fund more effective measures like carbon capture. Metal recycling still makes sense, but plastic recycling is mostly a psychological comfort.