What if plastic dumped into mantle of earth?
Answers
Answer:
2 reasons:
There are just not many areas in the world with active volcanoes, or as you put it, “molten lava pit”. Developing the technology and infrastructure to do so for the tiny number of countries that can do it just doesn't make sense.
It is far more complicated than you think to build an entire infrastructure around a region that is, by definition, likely to fall apart at any moment. The lava could flow out, rendering the transport chain useless. Or the entire ground around it could collapse from the shifting liquid underneath, burying all infrastructure.
OK I lied. There is a 3rd reason. The vast majority of our (non recyclable) waste is combustible. Throwing it into a lava pit wouldn't bury it, but rather combust it into a whole mixture of noxious gas that harms people and the environment. If you're going to combust it anyway, there are existing infrastructure available to handle waste: waste incinerators. These systems:
Can be built anywhere as it does not depend on specific geography.
Is a long lasting investment that can be built to last long enough to recover cost. Also, it is proven commercial technology that requires no new R&D.
Already captures the waste gas and breaks it down into harmless (less the greenhouse effect) products that can, for the most part, be safely released into the atmosphere.
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Ryan Carlyle
Ryan Carlyle, BSChE, Subsea Hydraulics Engineer
Answered Sep 6, 2013 · Author has 1.5k answers and 13.6m answer views
There are cheaper ways to incinerate trash. Most garbage is paper and plastic, which would simply combust immediately. Then it forms air pollution.
Molten rock is much denser than 99% of what we throw away. So any trash that survived the heat (or just slag/ash from burned trash) would float on the surface of whatever lava pool we were attempting to use for disposal.
Explanation: