[ars]

> I don't understand why it's even legal to produce disposable plastic containers today that are not 100%, easily recyclable

It's because it's completely harmless to landfill them.

Litter is bad. Full stop. Landfill however is not.

I've noticed a trend in these types of articles that conflates the two things as if they were the same. Then they tend of mix in info (plastic in the ocean) that applies to countries that dispose of trash in their local rivers.

[AstralStorm]

You know where landfill ends up in when not properly sealed?

Groundwater and rain runoff.

Drinking partially degraded plastic is not exactly neutral to health. Poisoning wildlife with the added colorings or plastics themselves, neither. Especially insidious are plastic fibres - partially synthetic textiles. These should all be burned clean at very high temperatures first.

Litter is easy to remove and even burn, micrometer level plastic dust is not. Standard water treatment at best can sediment some kinds of microplastics but not all. The cutoff levels that are safe for health for some plastics are miniscule for chronic intake. (Urethanes especially - kidney toxicity and cancer, probably others too. BPA is a joke compared to base PET stock at micrometers chronically.)

[ars]

> You know where landfill ends up in when not properly sealed?

So then don't do that?

And realistically, are landfills in the US and Europe leaking or not?

[AstralStorm]

Water runoff and sludge from landfills is treated, however only final very time consuming steps of biological sedimentation and treatment can remove most of them. Or very fine reverse osmosis or treatment with micron level filters, very energy intensive. So they do tend to end up in clean drinking water. There are many sources and no norms.

Sometimes even metals bordering on norms can be detected near landfills.

Sample efficiency ranges: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00431...

I had a link with site in Sweden barely keeping norms for lead and cobalt... due to organic decomposition and incomplete runoff collection. Bad enough that I wouldn't build a well within some 10 km radius.

Read up on what happens to all this thing called leachate.

This is a main reason why European Commission wants the landfills to remain as exception.

[jfeser]

> And realistically, are landfills in the US and Europe leaking or not?

Yes, they are. See https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-040-03/. A key quote:

> The USEPA has concluded that all landfills eventually will leak into the environment

We can minimize the amount of material that leaks, but it seems that all landfills will eventually leak at least some of their contents.

[triceratops]

Landfills are funded by the public. Public money has to be spent to fix problems caused by private companies. Is that not a problem?

[cmurf]

People are lazy and selfish. If government doesn't give them a disincentive: fines for littering, high taxes for buying unrecyclable plastics or banning them outright, people flat out do not change their behavior. If everyone on earth consumed and trashed as much as the average American, the whole planet would be a toxic waste dump. And we've seen that in the early part of the industrial revolution in the U.S., toxic rivers and streams, that took decades and billions of mostly public funds to clean up those superfund sites.

[MandieD]

Most Germans don't bring back racks of glass beer bottles and bags full of plastic water bottles because they care about the environment so much - they do it because there's a 0.08-0.15 EUR deposit on reusable glass, 1.50 EUR on the plastic racks and 0.25 EUR on one-time use plastic drink bottles, and big stores that sell bottle drinks have developed automats for accepting the empties and tallying up the refunds because they have to accept all standard bottles, even if they don't sell that particular item.

Any other recycling that happens is mostly because trash bins are only emptied every two weeks, and more than a 60L bin for a household is punitively expensive. Even if you don't care about the 3.10 EUR you'd get back for the rack of beer, you do care about having to pay to get rid of something that large.