US centric viewpoints. The UK is running out of space for landfills. Burning it is best for all.

This feels like very low quality propaganda.

Like at one point it spends a whole paragraph on how landfills are better than just spreading trash around randomly.

Is there someone out there seriously arguing that developing nations should just recycle and entirely skip modern landfills?

Are they implicitly arguing that the US has a developing nation level of civic infrastructure?

> In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic

So after a couple years? How is this supposed to be an argument in favor of disposable bags? My reusable ones are just fine after probably at least a decade.

Likewise with the mug; ignoring for a moment that drinking out of a polystyrene cup is disgusting (especially with hot liquids like coffee that one normally uses a mug for), the argument is supposed to be that a mug (a thing that should last a lifetime) is somehow worse than disposable cups because it takes 2-3 years to be better purely on an energy basis?

And the milk bottle: okay, it takes 10 trips to be better; ChatGPT says various sources say a typical bottle lasts 10-30 trips. So it's better. What even is the argument here?

The first two steps are reduce and reuse, after all. Recycle is last.

The article points out that some things like low quality plastics are hard to recycle (and I guess they break and are hard to reuse), perhaps that's a sign that we shouldn't use them.

Knowing a cotton bag needs a put 170 uses to pay come out on top of plastic bags is a reminder to use those bags more, if I had one with me most of the time I could do that in a year and stop accumulating "bag for life" plastic bags.

In fact, there is no longer enough waste in China to burn, so they have even started digging up previously buried waste to generate electricity.

This article disingenuously ignores reuse of a reusable asset. The argument falls apart as soon as higher quality things are made with reuse in mind. You don’t throw cotton bags away after the first use.

Single use plastics are a colossal waste of resources and cause environmental damage when not correctly disposed of. That reason alone should render their use outlawed.

Do note this is a Koch Bros pro-fossil publication. It'll call out some externalities but not others.

Dropped some stuff off at a landfill a few weeks ago. Place was a mess, made me feel like a dirty human.