Let’s go to the black hole and throw shit down there.
Wouldn’t it violate the GIGO Principle?
Hey Dana! I think it is possible, however, this is sadly impractical (unless we become completely desperate in the near future). I actually arrived in this post after searching if we can myself. I thought that this would be a really simple and easy way to solve the adversity of none of us getting our shit together (pun intended) but if you think about it. It’s not. It’s expensive to send or launch objects into the atmosphere, how much more launching objects out of our planet? But if there was a way to solve our garbage disposal problem, then please, do tell me. I’d really love to know. (Not being sarcastic).
Again, what garbage disposal problem?
Well, I actually HAD a garbage disposal problem.
But a quick trip to Lowes and 45 minutes under the sink got me a new disposer and voila! no garbage disposal problem.
Maybe we could send a giant zombie garbage disposal unit out into a black hole and have the two of them fight it out.
The OP sounds like an episode from ST: Voyager.
There is a(n apparently pretty obscure) novel with similar ideas.
Hawking singularity is captured by the Earth, starts threading its way through the planet, growing with each pass. Solution involves moving one of Mars’s moons into Earth orbit to capture the black hole at its apogee, former Martian moon stays in Earth’s orbit with the black hole at its center. Black hole is used for disposing of hazardous waste.
Landfills are relatively cheap and long-term solutions to garbage today, so people would need to provide some reason why spending a million times more money and fantastic amounts of fuel to get the stuff off earth is a good idea, no matter where they intend it to wind up.
If you really want a different solution than landfalls, work out a way to use garbage to create sea walls to combat rising ocean levels. That would be more expensive than a landfall but also about a million times cheaper than launching it into space while doing something good and useful with the waste.
Didn’t you see the documentary Wall-E?
What garbage exactly are we talking about? Disposable diapers? Lawn clippings? Old soda cans?
What makes something “garbage” as opposed to “recyclable” is how much effort it takes to turn the trash into a usable freedstock for another product. A soda can isn’t trash if you can take that aluminum and melt it down into another soda can, right? That’s what recycling is all about.
Every product can be dealt with this way. Lawn clippings and disposable diapers can be composted. Plastic of every kind can be recycled. Even hazardous waste and useless stuff can be recycled into harmless carbon dioxide and water if you just incinerate it cleanly. And stuff you can’t really recycle chemically like radioactive waste can just be buried in a hole in the ground.
Any guesses as to how much energy it would take to lift a ton of garbage into Earth orbit compared to how much energy it would take to incinerate that garbage? And if this garbage is so hazardous that you can’t risk having it sit at the bottom of a mineshaft on Earth, how exactly can you justify putting this hazardous waste on top of a giant pile of explosives?
Yeah, it takes time, money, and effort to reduce the waste stream by recycling all the components of the waste stream. That’s why it’s easier and cheaper to just dump it in a landfill and forget about it. But loading stuff onto a rocket and sending it into the sun or out of the solar system is just about the most expensive way of dealing with waste that’s imaginable. Every substance created by man can be unmade, it just takes some effort. And the effort to unmake the millions of tons of garbage is going to be substantially less than the effort of launching millions of tons of stuff into space.
I feel I haven’t emphasized enough how much time and effort and expense and, yes, waste, is required to lift a kilogram of matter into Earth orbit. It’s really a lot. No, more than that. There is literally no substance on Earth so hard to deal with that it would make sense to send it off Earth, even if we could do it by space elevator. And the harder a particular substance is to deal with, and the more imperative it is to get it away from human beings, the less sense it makes to put it on a stack of explosives and light the thing off. Rockets explode all the time, because they’re made of explosives. It’s kind of their thing.
There’s a story about this (possibly legend):
When our neighboring state of Iowa started giving a 5¢ cash payment for every empty aluminum can turned it, they suddenly had a glut of them, which their regular garbage disposal sites didn’t want. So they leased unproductive land from an old farmer, to bury all these cans in pits there. They paid the farmer for this lease for 20 years, and terms specified they were to cover all the pits when done. And that the land + contents remained the property of the landowner.
After these pits were filled, they lay buried for a decade or two. But then the price of aluminum went up. So the farmer (his descendants, actually) then discovered that they had the most valuable aluminum mine in all of Iowa. Possibly all of America, since their ‘ore’ was already refined & pure – just melt it down into pure aluminum.
So his grandchildren made a whole lot of money from selling the ‘garbage’ that their grandfather made a lot of money for accepting. Quite possibly, a lot of our garbage will be valuable in the future.
Many downtown Minneapolis buildings are heated by garbage burned in an incinerator. But with increased recycling, they are running short of garbage to burn. So they are accepting garbage from not only our county, but other nearby counties. Currently, they have a problem competing on price with burial sites, but as the problems with leakage & water contamination from those sites are requiring expensive measures to correct, the price are becoming similar. (Unfortunately, our incinerator is close to 30 years old, and not as clean as newer ones. Plus people keep throwing things like mercury batteries & CFL lightbulbs into the trash, which release air contaminants when burned.)