Why can't we just ship our waste into space?

Question

We are filling up landfills faster than they can be created with our wasteful habits. Can't we just take things that were thrown away, load them onto a rocket, and crash it onto Venus where the acid rain will take care of it?

Answer 1

Nullgate, you're a dork.  Radioactive wastes?  Who said we'd sending up nuclear waste?  

Basically, it costs too much to send up one light rocket, let alone hundreds of heavy ones.  Now, if we ever got the geosync elevator to work, we could start lobbing stuff towards the sun, but that's another story all in itself.

Answer 2

If we kept shipping waste out into space, our earth's natural resources (however large they may be) would eventually diminish more and more and we would find ourselves with empty mines, big holes in the ground minerals used to be and other holes where there should have been dumpsters, and people wondering why our earth's been knocked out of orbit.  We will never ship waste into space unless it becomes economically advantageous to do so.  It will always be cheaper to ship to or purchase more cheap land for landfills.  Heck, we still have Siberia and Northern Canada to work with... not to mention Antarctica.  And if all those get filled up, then we always have the Ocean!

Instead of continuing our wasteful consumeristic habits and looking for a quick fix like launching trash into space, why not spend more time focusing on the three R's:  Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

We cannot continue our wasteful habits at the pace we are going.  Eventually when we run out of landfill space, it will no longer be free to get garbage picked up... and waste will be reduced.  When landfill space runs out more, these fees will become steeper until eventually it will become economically disadvantageous to dump trash.

I predicted it would happen to gas gussling SUVs; it will happen to gas eventually.

Answer 3

Ignoring costs... How about safety?

Imagine what would happen if a rocket full of waste failed to acheive orbit or exploded at launch or shortly there after.  It would be  like a dirty bomb spreading radioactive waste over a large area.

Answer 4

have you thought of how much money we would have to spend of making a rocket just to ship out some waste?

Answer 5

Well we *could* do that, but it would be so unbelievably expensive the country would go bankrupt after several trips. I don't think you realize how expensive even routine trips into space are. Everything is optimized to weigh the least amount possible on space shuttles, and every last thing is accounted for.

It's like asking why we don't pave our roads out of diamonds and platinum since it'd be stronger than asphalt.

And by the way, we're not lacking any kind of space when it comes to landfills. There's plenty of space and when landfills become full they're bulldozed over and become golf courses, so you really shouldn't worry about it too much.

Answer 6

You mention the answer: the cost.  Right now, making landfills and not seeing the effects of environmental damage affect us in our daily lives is far, far cheaper than transporting stuff into space at the cost of about $1 million per pound.

Everything boils down to the average person's mentality of, "Well that's a terrible thing, of course, but it doesn't really affect me personally in an immeidate way, so who cares? But, sure, someone should do something about it.  Just don't let that someone make me pay for it."

Sad but true.

Welcome to the real world.

Answer 7

Actually sending garbage into space is extremely wasteful.

1. We lose the material that constitutes the garbage.

2. If you bury garbage you not only reclaim the materials when you grow trees on top of it but you also reclaim the land lost as well as harvest the energy produced by it's decay.

3. The decay of the materials itself would make sending it into space dangerous not only to the crew, and the people around but to any environment that is within the range of a spacecraft explosion. This would release unbroken down toxins into environments that might destroy ecosystems.

4. Sending something into space requires huge amounts of fuels to be burnt, far more than transporting it to a landfill.

Another thing to consider is that the modern view point on environmental protection is to keep it exactly the same as it is. This is not natural by any means considering that the Earth is constantly fluctuating and species are constantly evolving to  meet the new demands of their ecosystem or dying out. Consider that 90% of all species that have ever lived have died.

P.S Before you consider recycling a viable alternative you might want to consider that in the U.S alone the recycling industry gets 80 Billion dollars a year form the government to operate yet only generates 26 Billion in revenues. That means that 54 Billion dollars are wasted and this wastefulness is redistributed into our society. So now we don't see the waste and it seems cheaper but really all we are doing is moving the same waste if not more around. The thing you should recycle is aluminum cans, it is cheaper to make cans from recycled aluminum than it costs to mine new materials. (That's why transiants collect aluminum cans and always have.)

Answer 8

Maybe we see where that will lead in the long term.