[midoridensha]

Why is it terrible? The OP said to burn what you can for electricity, so that really should just leave metals. Copper is valuable, so hopefully they'd strip all the wiring and recycle it, leaving just steel and maybe aluminum (which itself is valuable for recycling too). How is dumping steel car frames in the ocean "terrible"? These days, entire ships are sunk (after getting all the fluids out of them) to actually help the ocean wildlife as artificial reefs.

However, I do agree there should be a lot more effort to recycle this stuff.

[mngnt]

Burning plastic/paper/other packaging gets you a lot of toxic stuff in the atmosphere. I know there are filters and processes and whatnot, but it just feels wrong and smelly.

Aluminium recycling actually works great, recycled aluminium is 95% less energy expensive and some 75% of aluminium comes from recycling. (1)

Steel could also be recycled like that, I guess ships are a lot more difficult to cut apart and melt down than cars, because they are heavier and larger (citation needed). At any rate, we put a lot of resources and energy into the steel for cars, maybe we should use that steel as much as possible instead of putting more energy into more steel.

(1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling

[midoridensha]

I see now. I misunderstood: I thought you were saying that dumping the remaining steel shells in the ocean was terrible for the ocean. Yeah, burning all that stuff is terrible.

[mngnt]

I meant it in a more systemic way. Getting rid of waste is always worse then reducing ir reusing.

[tonyedgecombe]

>after getting all the fluids out of them

Stripping the toxic elements out of a car isn't trivial, especially so in a place as poor as Tonga.