We have been burning our trash here in southern NH for years.
It also creates electricity.
The only thing that ends up in landfill is stuff like construction debris.
There are companies that buy the cardboard, steel cans, aluminum cans, glass bottles, mixed clean paper.
The problem for PR is the shipping cost to get those potential recyclables to the place that will buy them is too much.
I’m a fan of plasma gasification it’s the next level up from just incineration for steam and electricity. With plasma you get clean syngas and you can do some neat things once you have clean syngas. The obvious choice is run a combined cycle gas turbine at 60% eff twice what a steam plant would do.
Another choice is turn the syngas via Iron catalysts to C1-C4 alkanes and alkenes that’s methane(natural gas),ethane, ethylene(HDPE,LDPE),propane,propylene(polymers),butane,butene(more polymers,all synthetic oils). Of course any of the C1-4 can be hydrated to their alcohols(methanol,ethanol,isopropyl,butanol).
Gas fermentation technology is mature with a number of industrial scale companies.LanzaTech is the world leaders and they have engineered microbes that eat carbon monoxide and hydrogen and make 150 different chemicals including complete proteins, starch or sugars and lipids. Read that as complete food for animals or even people.
Of course you could just go old.skool and use cobalt catalysts to do the WWII German thing and make long chain alkanes C6-10 is petrol, C10-16 is jet fuel and C16-20 is diesel. C20+ is a fine lubricant base stock and wax. Once you have syngas any hydrocarbon is just some chemistry away. Add in nitrogen from the air and proteins are in reach too.
https://netl.doe.gov/research/Coal/energy-systems/gasification/gasifipedia/westinghouse
Yes, shipping is insane now, even domestically.
But TD only requires the local transport that is already being done.
The equipment is not complex.