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I was watching something about landfills on tv and how there is miles and miles of just trash sitting in landfills. sooo I thought well what else could we do with that TRASH?
would it be possible to send it to space? like they leave parts of the space shuttles in space right? and if it ever re-entered the atmosphere, it would burn up before it hit earth right?
I don't know just a thought.
amyh069, the problem is that most recycling is not cost effective. It is cheaper to make new glass than to recycle it. It is cheaper to make new plastic than to recycle as well. Aluminum cans are a gold mine and save a boatload of money and energy when they are recycled but just about everything else is a net loss. The first city I lived in that had recycling bargained with the recycler that in order to get all the aluminum cans they also had to take the glass and paper. The profit from the cans paid for the glass and paper recycling. Not sure how profitable the deal was for the company but they stuck with it for years. Recycling is not going ot happen unless there are economic incentives.
The problem is that the companies that make packaging do not have to deal with the indirect costs like disposal. Ideally everything we buy should be priced to include the indirect costs as well.
moving trash from one place to another is unfortunately not going to solve the problem, and eventually it will probably come back to bite us in the butt if we do, I think we should come up with a recycling plan and go through all the trash, almost everything can be recycled its just that the corporations choose to only recycle certain things, like plastic, glass, and cardboard, but much more can be recycled than that people just choose not to put out the extra effort, I think we could eliminate the landfill problem all together by reducing the amount of "trash" we dispose of and recycling it
Putting 1 lb into a low earth orbit cost approximately $10,000. Of course trash in low earth orbit would eventually reenter our atmosphere and until then would be a menace to rockets lifting real satalites into space so the trash would have to escape earth's orbit making it somewhat more expensive.
If we spent the entire federal budget on lifting trash into space it wouldn't be enough to deal with the trash of even a single moderate sized city.
It might be practical one day to dispose of small amounts of certain high level wastes by shooting it into space with a rail gun though.
Ok, you don't see mother nature throwing away water after it's been evaporating and you don't see mother nature throwing away rocks when it's tired of them. We're part of this planet and we need to follow the rules of this planet. That included accepting the way things work around here and actually doing the same. That means not just throwing things away, dumping them into landfills, burrying it underground (yes, this was the way people got rid of waste some time ago), but going along with what created you and reuse/recycle. The universe throws away nothing and neither should we.
But you also need to consider the cost to put it in space. It sounds like a good idea to send it on a one way course out of our solar system but it takes a lot of fuel to get it up there.
Yeah sending it to space is a right solution!
burn it.
