Burning trash creates a lot of harmful pollution, causing illness in people who live nearby, and releasing harmful particulates and CO2 into the atmosphere.
Because Japanese residents aggressively organize their trash for pickup. That is why they can confidently burn trash without releasing harmful substances into the environment.
We have way more land than Japan does, and in order to incinerate trash, you have to meet specific requirements for many of the toxic pollutants to be destroyed in the incineration process. Otherwise you risk inhalation issues in nearby areas. It also has to be processed and separated more throughly because some materials simply can’t be incinerated. It’s cheaper to truck it out and just create mounds of it out in the desert or New Jersey, sadly.
The US does incinerate but they don’t have good source seperation ( Home sorting) so the incinerators often are above legal pollution limits and are shut down after a while. For example, Detroit’s incinerator operated for 25 years, stunk up and entire area of the city as was recently shutdown. Second, is that the sheer size of the US allows for landfilling which is cheaper, and for most part less polluting. Japan incinerates because they don’t have land for landfills. Finally, proper incineration is expensive, and the US, as opposed to Japan, doesn’t have the willingness or the tax base for incineration. Mostly because there’s land available for landfills.
Japan has a population 36% that of the United States and about 4% of the US’ land area. Space is at a premium. While landfills can be covered over and reclaimed, this takes time, and you’re left with relatively unstable ground in a seismically active area (in Japan’s case). Incinerating waste dramatically reduces the volume that landfills take up.
It has tradeoffs, of course. It’s expensive. Even if you manage to extract energy from the burning waste, you have plant maintenance and another transportation stop in the waste management cycle.
My country has had an incinerator for 30 years that has burned our waste for most of the 350k people. And generated electricity from doing that. They shut it down this winter. Turns out that burning toxic things puts lots of toxic things in the air. And the cost to add on to the scrubbers to further remove things is really, really expensive.
The US population still has an outdated view of what modern incineration is. Very popular in Europe, China, Japan, etc. we’d rather just ship out plastics to Low wage Countries for example than incinerate. Modern technology allows for carbon capture, but things need to be sorted
Incineration produces captive waste, surely there is potentialfor efficiently and safely dealing with whatever comes of it, especially the useful stuff.
The US does have waste incineration. California had 3 waste incinerators in operation just a few years ago:
SERRF in Long Beach
Commerce Waste-To-Energy in the city of Commerce
Crows Landing in Stanislaus County
As of 2025, none of these plants are in operation. They were built in the 1980s and didn’t have significant improvements since then.
The truth is: burning trash is incredibly dirty. To clean up emissions, you can do things like install catalyst beds. But certain catalysts are easily fouled by certain wastes. For instance, shampoo contains siloxane and, when incinerated, attacks precious metal catalysts. So if you want to burn trash cleanly, you have to remove all the shampoo bottles by hand or you foul your catalyst.
It’s much, much easier, cheaper, and safer to just throw your trash in a (well-designed) hole in the ground, called a landfill.
Japan has densely populated metro areas, and that allows for very efficient vending machine businesses to thrive as folks train into the business areas for work. Those vending machines and that train culture serve as powerful control agents for strong recycling sorting practices.
TLDR: Japanese people take recycling sorting very seriously, and there are many ways the entire culture revolves around those practices that makes things like garbage incineration easier to manage. Also: limited land, so they have to.
West Palm Beach, FL has operated a waste to electric plant since the 80s. No smells, they make money from accepting barges of NYC garage and selling electric. It isn’t a perfect system, but certainly better than 1000s of acres of garbage mountains as seen in other counties in Florida.
My understanding is that it’s pretty expensive to run compared to just putting things in a landfill, and I think there’s controversy around whether it’s actually better for the environment or not, since it is emitting all sorts of stuff in the burning process.
its mostly because japan has a much stricter garbage system then most of the west. u sort by recycle, non burnable, burnable, plastics and paper etc. plus they also have a central collection point in most neighbourhood.
basically if the west decided to sort there trash better, they might start burning.
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We do it in Denmark as well, and then we have a whole underground valve system that transfer the heat out to homes throughout the most of Denmark
Burning trash creates a lot of harmful pollution, causing illness in people who live nearby, and releasing harmful particulates and CO2 into the atmosphere.
They do pollute. The UK has incinerators too If you have the space landfills seem to be a better option.
Because Japanese residents aggressively organize their trash for pickup. That is why they can confidently burn trash without releasing harmful substances into the environment.
We have way more land than Japan does, and in order to incinerate trash, you have to meet specific requirements for many of the toxic pollutants to be destroyed in the incineration process. Otherwise you risk inhalation issues in nearby areas. It also has to be processed and separated more throughly because some materials simply can’t be incinerated. It’s cheaper to truck it out and just create mounds of it out in the desert or New Jersey, sadly.
The US does incinerate but they don’t have good source seperation ( Home sorting) so the incinerators often are above legal pollution limits and are shut down after a while. For example, Detroit’s incinerator operated for 25 years, stunk up and entire area of the city as was recently shutdown. Second, is that the sheer size of the US allows for landfilling which is cheaper, and for most part less polluting. Japan incinerates because they don’t have land for landfills. Finally, proper incineration is expensive, and the US, as opposed to Japan, doesn’t have the willingness or the tax base for incineration. Mostly because there’s land available for landfills.
Sweden imports trash to burn. We have central heating distribution that rely on the heat from trash.
I’m pretty sure Hawaii does incinerate garbage to some degree.
Japan has a population 36% that of the United States and about 4% of the US’ land area. Space is at a premium. While landfills can be covered over and reclaimed, this takes time, and you’re left with relatively unstable ground in a seismically active area (in Japan’s case). Incinerating waste dramatically reduces the volume that landfills take up.
It has tradeoffs, of course. It’s expensive. Even if you manage to extract energy from the burning waste, you have plant maintenance and another transportation stop in the waste management cycle.
Stateside low value land is generally cheaper than incinerating in a way that meets environmental requirements.
Japan, not so much.
Extremely rude to the Japanese – love everyone
Wait you guys don’t incinerate your trash and just dump it onto the earth? Wtf
Some places in the US do—but there is a lot of pushback against it.
https://www.hennepin.us/en/your-government/facilities/hennepin-energy-recovery-center
My country has had an incinerator for 30 years that has burned our waste for most of the 350k people. And generated electricity from doing that. They shut it down this winter. Turns out that burning toxic things puts lots of toxic things in the air. And the cost to add on to the scrubbers to further remove things is really, really expensive.
The US population still has an outdated view of what modern incineration is. Very popular in Europe, China, Japan, etc. we’d rather just ship out plastics to Low wage Countries for example than incinerate. Modern technology allows for carbon capture, but things need to be sorted
Incineration produces captive waste, surely there is potentialfor efficiently and safely dealing with whatever comes of it, especially the useful stuff.
The US does have waste incineration. California had 3 waste incinerators in operation just a few years ago:
As of 2025, none of these plants are in operation. They were built in the 1980s and didn’t have significant improvements since then.
The truth is: burning trash is incredibly dirty. To clean up emissions, you can do things like install catalyst beds. But certain catalysts are easily fouled by certain wastes. For instance, shampoo contains siloxane and, when incinerated, attacks precious metal catalysts. So if you want to burn trash cleanly, you have to remove all the shampoo bottles by hand or you foul your catalyst.
It’s much, much easier, cheaper, and safer to just throw your trash in a (well-designed) hole in the ground, called a landfill.
Japan has densely populated metro areas, and that allows for very efficient vending machine businesses to thrive as folks train into the business areas for work. Those vending machines and that train culture serve as powerful control agents for strong recycling sorting practices.
TLDR: Japanese people take recycling sorting very seriously, and there are many ways the entire culture revolves around those practices that makes things like garbage incineration easier to manage. Also: limited land, so they have to.
Global warming? We should just launch it into the sun.
West Palm Beach, FL has operated a waste to electric plant since the 80s. No smells, they make money from accepting barges of NYC garage and selling electric. It isn’t a perfect system, but certainly better than 1000s of acres of garbage mountains as seen in other counties in Florida.
The garbage powers 90K homes.
We do have that option in some places and the upside of the incineration is that helps power other people’s homes.
We have a waste-to-energy plant in Spokane.
My understanding is that it’s pretty expensive to run compared to just putting things in a landfill, and I think there’s controversy around whether it’s actually better for the environment or not, since it is emitting all sorts of stuff in the burning process.
big oil and gas companies are not stewards of Mother earth.
its mostly because japan has a much stricter garbage system then most of the west. u sort by recycle, non burnable, burnable, plastics and paper etc. plus they also have a central collection point in most neighbourhood.
basically if the west decided to sort there trash better, they might start burning.
There is a waste to energy facility in Syracuse, NY.