[OkayPhysicist]

> Your garbage will still turn into compost, just in a landfill

This point is not actually true. Landfills are not built to optimize for decomposition, they're optimized for density. The high density leads to heavily anaerobic conditions below the surface, to the point where excavating a landfill can find shit like newspapers from decades ago.

Plus, composting makes more sense from a land use perspective. If you're exclusively taking compostables, and shipping out the compost, your land use limits your throughput, but for a landfill, your land use limits area under that curve, cumulative input. You fill up a landfill, then you have to make another one. They are, somewhat ironically, disposable.

[tash9]

But the volume of compostable material is small compared to the overall trash volume, right?

Aren't we talking about a negligible quantity relative to amount of effort and (potentially) negative sentiment amongst swing voters?

[OkayPhysicist]

I don't think so. Ever since my household started putting food waste in the ward waste bin instead of the trash bin, our trash bin has been mostly empty on any given week. A few scraps of single-use plastics that can't be recycled,

Of course, that's assuming that your recycling isn't also going into the landfill, which isn't a great assumption.

[convolvatron]

you can't use landfill as compost because its really quite contaminated