Landfilling still seems very inefficient. As Sweden has done for a long time: what ever you put in "regular waste" goes to incineration. The heat is used for district heating. Remains from incineration can be landfilled. Exhaust gases are monitored and cleaned.
Regular landfills have thus been abolished, which is a success. It's a small step, but IMO a very notable achievement.
And it has outraged some that plastic "recycling" goes into the same system in many parts of the country. I don't mind in principle - it is their (local government's) system, they are tasked with being professional and disposing of collected plastic in the best way possible. If that's going to be burning with retention of heat, then that's acceptable.
Burning trash produces CO2 and that needs to be factored in. My guess is that CO2 produced transporting waste to landfill is less than that produced by burning. With landfills, there is problem with food and wharf waste producing methane. Separating that out and composting it, which produces CO2, is solution that my city does.
Sending waste to well-run landfill feels wrong but can be best alternative. We should probably worry less about recycling plastic and more about making sure there is no litter.
Capturing CO2 from flue gas requires a lot of energy (for something like a coal fired power plant, it takes about 30% of the power plant's energy output to capture the CO2) and you still have to deal with the CO2 after you've captured it - what do you do with it?
The only way to sequester it is to inject into underground reservoirs, but that requires a very specific geology which very few places have.
You can liquefy it and sell it... but then it's typically going to get released to the atmosphere by the purchaser, not sequestered.
I am not an expert in waste incineration (although I am an expert in carbon capture processes) but I seriously doubt that they use CO2 scrubbers. Scrubbers for other nasty molecules like SO2, sure, but the CO2 is probably just sent out into the atmosphere.
Regular landfills have thus been abolished, which is a success. It's a small step, but IMO a very notable achievement.
And it has outraged some that plastic "recycling" goes into the same system in many parts of the country. I don't mind in principle - it is their (local government's) system, they are tasked with being professional and disposing of collected plastic in the best way possible. If that's going to be burning with retention of heat, then that's acceptable.