From the article:

The case against landfill has two parts. The first part is that there are efficient, cheap, or environmentally friendly ways to practically reuse or recycle materials, rather than landfilling, meaning that there is a reasonable alternative. The second is that landfill itself is unsustainable, or environmentally unfriendly, meaning that we need an alternative. Both are false.

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Producing tiny slivers of plastic uses almost no energy. Making the polyethylene resin for a single thin plastic bag, then blowing and sealing it, uses something like 0.6 megajoules, roughly the same energy as a kettle uses for forty seconds. By contrast, cotton is extremely energy intensive, partly because cotton bags need to be much thicker to work, and weigh around 200 grams as compared to eight grams for polyethylene. Instead of a simple blowing and sealing process, the cotton must be made into yarn, woven into fabric, prepared, dried, sized, dyed, and finished, which takes around 1,725 megajoules, around 3,050 times as much energy.

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The case for recycling to avoid using virgin material is much stronger when it comes to metals. Recycling 1 kilogram of steel saves 1.4 kilograms of iron ore and uses 65 percent less energy. For aluminum, the energy savings from recycling can be as high as 95 percent. This is because making metal from scratch requires extremely energy-intensive chemical reduction of ores, while recycling primarily involves remelting metals already in their elemental form. Because recycling metals is cheaper than mining, refining, and smelting new ones, the world does an awful lot of it. About 30 percent of the metal used in steel production globally is now recycled scrap.

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Recycling is a straightforward process conceptually: collect waste, reprocess it, and turn it back into useful material. That picture breaks down once you look at what happens to waste after collection. Much of what is sent for recycling is never recycled. About 25 percent of items placed in American recycling bins are contaminants: for example, lids on containers, food, or damp paper. The number may be even higher, as the vast majority of US states do not consistently track contamination data. This can make the process energy or labor intensive and therefore expensive.

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Richer countries have near-universal refuse collection and almost none of their waste winds up in the ocean. In low-income countries, however, over 90 percent of waste is improperly managed, and typically ends up dumped, burned, or escaping into waterways. Plastic flows into the ocean overwhelmingly come from a small handful of rapidly growing Asian economies. Approximately a hundred rivers, mostly in South and South-East Asia, account for half of ocean plastic. And a substantial share of plastic in the ocean isn’t domestic waste at all, but rather discarded fishing gear.

Ocean litter is a huge environmental problem, and solving it means building cheap, effective, and safe waste management in those countries where it originates (plus perhaps cleaning the oceans up). If you live in a Western country, throwing your trash into the recycling bin rather than general waste makes no difference at all to the amount of flotsam in the ocean: whichever bin you choose, that’s not where it will end up.

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Even though recycling or reuse is energy intensive, it would be worth doing it if landfill was an environmental disaster. But most people’s image of landfill is severely out of date. They envisage a rotting mound of waste, dumped in an open hole in the ground and leaching dangerous chemicals into the soil. In most of the developed world, this hasn’t been true for decades. Engineers build modern landfills on thick layers of clay and tough plastic liners that contain the contaminated liquid that forms when rainwater filters through decomposing waste.

Operators place waste in thin layers, compact it tightly, and cover it regularly to control smells, litter, pests, and fire risk. As food and garden waste break down, gas wells pull methane out of the landfill body and route it to flares or generators instead of letting it escape into the air. This typically captures around 75 percent of the methane produced, and sometimes as much as 95 percent. Drainage layers and pipes collect contaminated liquid and send it for treatment, while operators monitor the surrounding ground and water, both throughout the site’s life and long after it closes. Regulators shut down badly run landfills.

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There is another option: burning trash. Perhaps counterintuitively, this can be a very environmentally friendly option and has the advantage of reducing the waste dramatically in volume. Controlled incineration, which burns waste in a sealed, high-temperature furnace, uses systems to catch pollutants, and is more efficient than landfill at containing methane, preventing virtually any from escaping. On top of all this, the heat released can be used to generate electricity.

Unfortunately, controlled burning is more expensive than landfill. In the US, landfill is reliably 20–30 percent cheaper. While it is possible to reduce costs by selling the electricity generated, modern incinerators are among the most expensive power plants to build per megawatt, in some cases costing an order of magnitude more than a conventional natural gas plant.

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In the developed world, though there are benefits to recycling, other waste disposal options are perfectly good alternatives. Modern, well-run landfills cause minimal environmental damage. We have plenty of space to put them – less than 0.01 percent of the US is used for landfill, less than 0.001 percent of Australia is, and only about 0.02 percent of Germany is. We can even build on top of old landfills, so the land area is not spent permanently. Nor are we about to run out of most of the materials commonly recycled. And because it is less resource-intensive, landfill is far cheaper than recycling.

Instead of paying more to recycle, we could spend that money far more effectively on other environmental mitigation measures like carbon capture. The main exception is metal recycling, which should likely be the primary or even exclusive focus of municipal recycling programs. Inasmuch as some landfill sites fall short of best practices, as some surely still do, improving monitoring and imposing penalties on sloppy operators is likely to pack a much bigger environmental benefit, at lower cost, than trying to divert more materials from landfill to recycling.

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There is a great humanitarian and environmental case for improving waste disposal systems in developing countries. But focusing effort on expensive recycling means getting less bang for our buck. Recycling is complex to sustain: it requires the successful coordination of collection, separation, contamination control, and reliable buyers for the material. If even one part of the chain breaks down, it doesn’t work. By contrast, landfill is simple and cheap. Investing in landfill, even suboptimal landfills, protects more local rivers, forests, lakes, and seas.