Supposedly you can recycle them, but normally they will be confined to a a small section of landfill. While “on a landfill” is not a good answer, it’s much better than “in the environment “
You could even argue that leachate is “good” in that it pulls all these contaminants out of the landfill to a concentrated place where they could in theory be removed (and placed in a landfill 🤪)
Landfills at least in the us absolutely are designed to encapsulate waste, to minimize leachate and to control runoff. The whole point is to bury it in a way that it will tend to stay buried.
There is evidence of paper not decomposing because it doesn’t get enough oxygen or water for microbes to do their thing
In landfills things stay buried if/until they can’t get washed away. That’s how microplastics get out, but bcs of the filtration of the ground that is very very slow.
And paper actually decomposes, usually with bacteria or other oxidation precesses. Plastics don’t really do that. If they did there literally wouldn’t be a microplastics problem. Something that smol would “decompose” basically immediately.
(Before bacteria ate celuloze trees would litter everything, basically a catastrophe, and then they became fossil fuels bcs there was nothing to decompose it.)
But it’s a hella convenient way of thinking that plastics in a landfill aren’t a problem.
Unlike cellulose, plastics do degrade into microplastics.
Supposedly you can recycle them, but normally they will be confined to a a small section of landfill. While “on a landfill” is not a good answer, it’s much better than “in the environment “
You could even argue that leachate is “good” in that it pulls all these contaminants out of the landfill to a concentrated place where they could in theory be removed (and placed in a landfill 🤪)
You can’t recycle them (very poorly at best, with extra harmful byproducts).
And landfills are not built like nuclear waste storage facilities.
Everything around us is ‘the environment’.
Landfills at least in the us absolutely are designed to encapsulate waste, to minimize leachate and to control runoff. The whole point is to bury it in a way that it will tend to stay buried.
There is evidence of paper not decomposing because it doesn’t get enough oxygen or water for microbes to do their thing
In landfills things stay buried if/until they can’t get washed away. That’s how microplastics get out, but bcs of the filtration of the ground that is very very slow.
And paper actually decomposes, usually with bacteria or other oxidation precesses. Plastics don’t really do that. If they did there literally wouldn’t be a microplastics problem. Something that smol would “decompose” basically immediately.
(Before bacteria ate celuloze trees would litter everything, basically a catastrophe, and then they became fossil fuels bcs there was nothing to decompose it.)
But it’s a hella convenient way of thinking that plastics in a landfill aren’t a problem.
Unlike cellulose, plastics do degrade into microplastics.