We do - as far as possible.
Over here, though, things look like this:
- recycling/reusing is always better than burning
- the stuff that is recyclable is also the same stuff that burns well, so with increased recycling/waste separation, the remainder of the trash burns less and less well. So bad, that you have to feed additional combustible materials just to burn the trash (not even starting to get temperatures good enough to run a power plant)
- disposing of CO2 in underground caverns (your high pressure tanks would be a bit too small for that) is currently discussed (for fossile power plants), but there are currently too many unknowns to decide whether this scheme is worth pursuing
It can and is done, Sweden converts most of it's trash to energy, and there are plasma converters which reduce trash to it's basic elements.
You cannot store CO2 it's volume would be huge and if you did you would be depriving us of oxygen to breathe, plus to separate C and O2 requires more energy than you get from burning it.
Only plants can do it with photosynthesis.
But the main reason it is not done is most councils/states are not willing to spend the capital required to build a plant, when they can just haul it off to a landfill.
That sounds like a good idea, it might pollute less and it is probably called biomass.
Global warming is such a problem that it is necessary to deal with all its aspects, which includes the politics. When politicians formulate their policy they need inputs from many disciplines and from science as well. But unfortunately global warming has become an absolutely political issue and politicians do their best to influence even science.
In 1992 at the Earth Summit the decision to prevent such dangerous climate change was taken. The first step was the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which is supposed to come into force in 2005.
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One of the reports of the U.N. Panel on Climate Changes warns that the U.S. and other wealthy countries should immediately cut their oil and gas consumption and agree to get at least a quarter of their electrical energy from renewable resources - solar and wind power; and that they should double their research spending on low-carbon energy by 2010.In 1997 the U.S. Senate voted 95-0 to make Clinton Administration not to send the Kyoto treaty to Capitol Hill for ratification. In his first term president Bush rejected Kyoto. Russia ratified it, but most believe that Putting was made to do that as British Prime Minister and other European Union officials threatened not to let him become a member of World Trade Organization, which could cost Russia billions of dollars each year. But the chief economic adviser of Putting - Andrei Illation shows his doubts as for the upholding commit to Kyoto, he says: "There is no evidence confirming a positive linking between the level of carbon dioxide and temperature change. The U.N. Panel's so called scientific data are considerably distorted and in many cases falsified" (Can We Defuse the Global Warming Time Bomb? by James Hansen, 2003, pp.2-15). One of the main ideas of Clarion and others is to break the advanced economies of the U.S., Europe and Japan, by persuading the multi-national companies to move plants and jobs to developing countries in order not to comply with emissions restrictions. But the president of the American Policy Center in Washington - Tom Decease doesn't agree that it makes sense, he states as the main concern and the prime target is the wealth of the United States it would not be wise to place factories in Third World countries, as the same amount of emissions would come out from jungles of South America instead of Chicago and in this case we are not talking about the protection of the environment any more. He is right in a way.
The main goal of the meeting in Kyoto was signing the amendment to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (the Rio Treaty) in order to require the signatory nations to take the necessary steps to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, as these gases cause an alarm situation with global temperatures. The costs of signing it for the U.S. could be really high, as the county could be made to reduce between 10 and 20 % of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2020 that would cause reduction of gross domestic products by $260 billion annually; it is equal to $2.700 per household. Certainly it was hard to prove that such costs are justified. Besides as millions of American people could be put at risk, several important questions appeared. The first one was about the possible merits or drawbacks of global warming. The World Bank researches prove that about one-third of the whole population suffers from water shortages. By 2025 they say - around 40 % of the whole population could be living in countries without sufficient water supplies. The crops will also suffer from lack of water. Global warming leads to more condensation and more evaporation, thus producing more rains. So it could be in a way an answer to the problem about lack of water. The second positive point about global warming is possibility of agriculture in North America and Europe, the southern regions of Greenland were not covered with ice when between 10th and 12th centuries the temperature was 0.5 degrees warmer than today, and could be also cultivated. The evidence of this was found when: "scientists from the National Science Foundation sponsored Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 extracted in an ice core from Greenland's ice sheet that spanned more than 100.000 years of climate history. Samplings from the core suggest that a Little Ice Age began between 1400 and 1420, blanketing the Vikings' farms in ice and forcing them to abandon their farms in search of more hospitable climates".( Michael Crichton's State of Fear: Climate Change in the Cineplex, by Amy Ridenour pp.1-5). Thus global warming could mean more agricultural productivity and more water resources.
It's better for the environment to recycle as much as possible. The other no one wants a garbage burning plant in their neighbourhood .
Carbon is still carbon. It would get fused with oxygen again.
Been there. Done that. Never worked.
We do.
I know it will be because of pollution, but if we can take the CO2 and CO and store it in high-pressure tanks, then there will be a source of a large amount of electricity.
Here's a "diagram" of what I mean
Trash goes to dump -->
Trash gets sorted between metals and burnables -->
Burnables are sent to an incinerator where they are burned and used for electricity -->
Smoke goes through chambers in the smokestacks and gets sucked out by air-compressors -->
Air-compressors deposit smoke in high-pressure storage tanks where we store the smoke until it is possible to separate the carbon and the oxygen efficiently.
