How does one deal with ground water pollution when just leaving trash in the ground? It must be much easier to clean pollutants like heavy metals from gases , than it is to clean whatever the rain dissolves out from under a landfill? Being Swedish, the idea of leaving trash in a hole at all feels strange. But then I'm assuming incineration is reasonably "clean" in the sense that pollutants can be filtered.
Being completely ignorant of the process, I don't understand how burning would possibly make it better. Let's say that you perfectly filter/capture bad stuff (and I'm extremely skeptical of both our ability to do it, and industry claims of our ability to do it). What do you do with it then... other than, put it in the ground / find some way to store it, and now we're back where we started?
I think a lot of us have this childhood mental image that "burning makes stuff go away". But it doesn't!
If you can capture and things like heavy metals or toxins, it's obviously going to be tiny amounts. Or - the amounts are the same but having a kg of cadmium in a jar is obviously easier to handle than a kg of cadmium dissolved in 20 tons of water.
Incineration replaces a large problem with a smaller one. Instead of having large amounts of bulk garbage, you get a smaller amount of hazardous waste. You need a much smaller landfill. You can also choose a location that minimizes the environmental impact, even if it's much farther away, because you don't have to worry so much about logistics.
But we all agree it doesn't disappear, right? Instead of large problem on the ground, I now have large problem in the air and small one on the ground.
What are the things that are easier to handle in the air than on the ground?
I feel either I am having a complete and utter intuitive misunderstanding of conservation of mass and stuff, or everybody else is :-D. I feel we are replacing stuff I can touch and move and cover and isolate and manage, with stuff that I now breathe in forever and lands in the water and on plants and people in a completely uncontrolled fashion. It did not magically go away somewhere, right? :-O
