IF there is so much garbage accumulating y dont they just set all the garbage on fire?

Question

IF there is so much garbage accumulating y dont they just set all the garbage on fire?

Answer 1

At present, our earth is in an environmental mess.

If garbage was to be set on fire, poisonous fumes would be created, harming many forms of life, contributing to greenhouse gases, and making the earth a not very pleasant place to be.

Understand that fumes don't just escape from the earth into space. They stay in the boundaries of the earth. This is why ice caps are melting, and weather is going crazy.

Setting garbage on fire is the last thing we want to be doing for the environment.

Answer 2

some place do that. It is more expensive than burning coal or wood

Answer 3

At one time when garbage was a problem. The news came on saying that we should burn the garbage, well i have a wood stove for heat and i do just that. it seems it cost more to re-cycle garbage than it would do to incinerate it. to incinerate it with the smoke running through filters sounds more appealing than throwing money away on re-cycling smelly ole garbage and the news got it from garbage companies, but it does make scence.

Answer 4

Matter cannot be created or destroyed. that is a fact (for now). This means that incinerating the world's garbage would not make it vanish. Instead, the garbage would be converted to air pollution, toxins in the water, and the food that we eat, acid rain, and CO2.

Burning all the world's garbage would free up some space, but not without dramatically increasing greenhouse gasses, air pollution, and throwing the ecosystems out of balance by killing off countless species (not to mention that there would be a fine layer of garbage dust on everything on Earth!).

The only way to reduce our garbage output is to recycle as much as we can, and not be wasteful, or send all our garbage out into space(still only a temporary fix).

Answer 5

pollution concerns and release of potential harmful/toxic fumes.

Answer 6

garbage contains polyethylene which take millions of years to degrade. Burning of garbage causes air pollution and soil pollution and causes desertification. Every thing has its own time to degrade. many substances present in it are non-biodegradable

Answer 7

I would think dangerous fumes, chemicals and the chance of the fire spreading maybe.

Answer 8

It's being done now.  Incinerators are used to produce electricity and the ashes are used to make cement.

Answer 9

they USED TO incinerate garbage just about everywhere

some buildings even had chutes where your garbage went tothe basement where it got burned on the spot and only metal etc got collected

but the air pollution from this was terrible, even when it was just food garbage. Now with so much plasticwrapping etc the smoke might also be toxic

some cities still incinerate garbage, after sorting out the toxic-making stuff, and use the heat from the burning to make hot water (either for the town to use or sometimes a heated swimming pool) but they still get a lot of stuff they can't burn. Tins (tin or aluminium) glass and most plastics can be recycles and most paper, nearly everywhere recycles these if people put them in the right bin, but it is too costly to sort these out if they get put in the general garbage. Then there is the bulky stuff  - furniture car parts etc which wont burn safel;y but are made of many different materials that are hard and costly to separate.

so all this stuff gets crushed and buried. Organic parts of it slowly rot down. there is plenty of space in every country for burying garbage, the main problems are nobody wants it done close to their placebecause it is smelly, and collecting all the garbage from everywhere is a bigger problem than where to put it once they've picked it up.

do your bit by buying with as little packaging as possible, takeyour own bag don't get the plastic from the shop, sort  your garbage into the right recycling bins so less gets buried,if you have a garden consider composting your vegetable scraps.