I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason why we haven’t done this yet. Too expensive? Would launching it into the sun cause the smoke (if there is even smoke in space) to find its way back to Earth, therefore polluting the air?
This is an incredibly stupid question.
I think it’s a great idea, the rest of these commenters are being scaredy cats who love garbage and want to keep it close
The short answer is just that doing so would be ridiculously difficult and expensive. Funnily enough, “launch it into the sun” is actually the easy part at this point. If we could collect all of the ocean’s trash, we probably would have done so and compressed it by now.
I love the optimism here, but unless there was a significant potential for profit, none of the people who have the resources to begin collecting ocean plastics could care less.
The sad truth is that the majority of the world’s resources are owned and controlled by a handful of psychopaths.
Orbital mechanics makes launching stuff at the sun extremely difficult.
The earth has a gigantic a molten layer under our feet, and we couldn’t even dump it down there. Too expensive and difficult.
Long term, my guess is engineered super bacteria and/or robotics may clean up the trash in the future, if we don’t extinct ourselves first.
Launching stuff into the sun takes a shitton of delta-V. We should just launch it into the moon.
sun gets rid of it tho
But then all the fumes won’t just pollute the earth they will pollute the solar system, think of the animals on mercury, have a heart
have a heart
I have a better idea! Launch it into a stable orbit in the oort cloud and maybe we can create a new planet there to colonize in a few centuries! It’s perfect because then we have the perfect place to send the radioactive soil from WWIII and a perfect base to hide from WWV from!
if I know my science fiction, it’s bound to get infested with nazis, dinosaurs, and bigfoots (bigfeet?) which might be worth it for the dinosaurs and bigfoots but I am sick to my ass of nazis.
Even if you could do this, it would be more effective to just do the “collect all the garbage” part and then store it in a heavily lined container forever.
It costs about $10,000 US to get a kilo of payload as far as Low Earth Orbit. I’m not sure this is going to scale up.
I’m fairly certain there’s a Futurama episode on this topic
Yeah let’s make our trash New New York’s problem.
Or better yet, New New New York’s!
Because incineration or proper disposal is not the problem. Gathering and segregation is. Plus, launching that sort of payload is going to be insanely costly.
The sheer volume is manageable as it currentlyis, but it’s spread out so much that collecting it properly is going to take a lot of time an effort.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a bit of a misnomer, as it’s more of a vague area in which trash tends to collect. It’s not like an actual continuous patch that you can easily attack with a net.
Plus, launching that sort of payload is going to be insanely costly.
And causes its own additional air pollution as part of the launch.
First - The major problem with trash isn’t the getting rid of it part, it’s the gathering it up part. If we could do that, it wouldn’t be a problem.
Second - Launching things on a rocket is kinda dangerous still, there’s a risk the rocket will blow up on launch, scattering the material across a large area. This is a big reason why things like nuclear waste is a problem to transport in general, much less flying it somewhere.
Third - Launching something into the SUN is really hard, it would be easier to send something out of the solar system than back into the sun.
https://van.physics.illinois.edu/ask/listing/43694Fourth - Someday we’ll figure out a use for everything, wall-e style. If we dump everything into a centralized landfill, we’ll eventually be able to collect/sort/recycle it into something useful. Throwing it into the sun (or off-planet) would make that stuff unavailable forever.
Finally - Throwing stuff into the sun would actually get rid of it forever, yes. It would be completely decomposed into the atoms it was made from. If we threw ENOUGH heavy metals into the sun, we could actually poison the sun making it not able to fuse hydrogen anymore, but even if we threw the entire earth into the sun, it wouldn’t be enough.
Also, sending things to space is way, way, way worse for our planet per kg of stuff, because of the fuel and parts that it takes
Another problem is that each item we throw into the Sun is comprised of atoms. We would literally be taking the atoms that makes up earth and throwing them away to a place where the atoms would no longer be part of earth. While a McDonalds cup isn’t going to catastrophically change earth, do it enough times and we could see a problem.
First - The major problem with trash isn’t the getting rid of it part, it’s the gathering it up part. If we could do that, it wouldn’t be a problem.
The frustrating part is that this could be the easiest to solve. Require boats to weigh in and out, and account for everything on board. Minus fuel, plus fish, but those old, broken nets and plastic waste need to return to port to be properly disposed of. Throwing even a soda can overboard should result in significant fines.
How do you weigh a boat precisely enough to detect a soda can missing?
Fair question. You’re not going to catch a soda can, but a boat should be a closed system. The thresholds should be as low as is practically enforceable.
What about fishing boats? They’re coming back with a ton of extra weight in fish.
Containers of fish are extremely easy to weigh.
A lot of ocean trash comes by river from poor countries.
Ocean trash comes from plastic manufacturers. Responsible wealthy countries ship their dutiful recyclables to garbage pits in poor countries.
Most poor people don’t even have the education or resources to polymerize crude into poly-vinyl, it’s harder than you’d think.
A lot of ocean trash comes by river from poor countries.
Also by river from wealthy countries, and has done so for centuries.
The scope of the task of removing it is far bigger than OP can imagine.
https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics
Most of the plastic in our oceans comes from land-based sources: by weight, 70% to 80% is plastic that is transported from land to the sea via rivers or coastlines
Most of the world’s largest emitting rivers are in Asia, with some also in East Africa and the Caribbean
Seven of the top ten rivers are in the Philippines. Two are in India, and one in Malaysia. The Pasig River in the Philippines alone accounts for 6.4% of global river plastics
Rich countries tend to have better functioning waste collection and disposal services.
Rich countries tend to have better functioning waste collection and disposal services.
These days it is a lot better, but it wasn’t always that way.
It has been that way for many decades.
What you also forgot to mention is just how much trash we generate… that would be a massive limiting factor as well. It’s hard enough to get a few tons of stuff on a rocket going to space. I couldn’t get an exact figure on a quick google search but humanity generates somewhere on the order of tens of thousands of metric tons of trash per day
Finally - Throwing stuff into the sun would actually get rid of it forever, yes. It would be completely decomposed into the atoms it was made from. If we threw ENOUGH heavy metals into the sun, we could actually poison the sun making it not able to fuse hydrogen anymore, but even if we threw the entire earth into the sun, it wouldn’t be enough.
How can earth have enough heavy metals for that?
:edit english is hard
You misread, I specifically said that Earth doesn’t have enough mass for that.
True, thanks
You got it: it’s expensive/ “not financially viable,” so it won’t happen
There is “not financially viable” and than there is spending 12 times the gdp of earth each year.
Gathering is the hard part but I’m afraid just making raw ore and water into rockets and fuel would use more energy than what we are using today, just to offset the current waste output
They touch on some relevant points of crossover in this interesting video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us2Z-WC9rao
Gathering all the trash to launch it into the sun isn’t easy, as many comments have pointed out. Not only do you have to counteract the velocity of Earth, but I’d expect you’d need a way to keep them alive on the trip there as well. I mean, I’m assuming you want them to be cognizant until the end, yeah?
It’s not too expensive.
The defense budget of the USA is 840 billion dollars. That’s not too expensive.
The reason it’s not being done is there’s no money to be made.
Profit first, survival of the species second.
Both can be true: it is too expensive, and there’s no money to be made. $840B wouldn’t put a dent in the launch costs for the tens of thousands of rockets we’d need to put into space over the next several decades in order to just get rid of the Pacific Garbage Patch, to say nothing of the rest of the trash on this planet.
And actually, there’s a third true thing: it wouldn’t help much. Having it on Earth isn’t the problem; it’s having it in the oceans that’s the problem. Partially because of the environmental impact, partially because of the biological impact, and partially because we don’t have access to it to reuse it, so we have to keep making more. Once we had it out of the oceans, we could recycle it or even just sequester it away.
And the one time the rocket goes kablooey on its way up, everyone down the flight path will get a shower of used hypodermic needles, disposable vapes, and old appliances.
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