What If We Dumped Our Trash in Space? | Unveiled

What If We Dumped Our Trash in Space?

Our trash is now affecting every conceivable corner of the globe. A 2019 mission to the deepest point on Earth, the Marianas trench, even revealed candy wrappers and a plastic bag floating at the bottom of it. Issues like plastic pollution and overflowing garbage sites are today a round-the-clock concern, leading to some extreme proposals on what to do next…

This is Unveiled and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; What if we dumped our trash in space?

Trash production in the US is said to have almost tripled since 1960. Meanwhile, in the UK, 90% of trash is reportedly buried in landfill. The amount we produce is increasing, but the ways we get rid of it aren’t always improving. Casting trash onto landfill sites can result in dangerous toxins seeping into the wider environment, including into the groundwater - particularly with electronics like TVs and computers which release mercury, arsenic, and other acids to leach into the soil. Clearly, something has to change.

We do have some alternatives to landfill for waste that can’t be recycled, but they have their fair share of problems, too. Incineration, for example, is when trash is burned down and turned into gas. The process can dramatically reduce the volume of waste to less than half of what it was… But the trade-off is that incinerators are also an environmental risk themselves, as they release harmful toxins back out into the air. Plus, there’s the problem of how to dispose of the ash that they create. And so, with the world’s trash piling up, one particularly radical solution is to move it off-earth entirely; to launch it into space!

On the face of it, it’s possible. The sprawling landfills polluting fields and the vast, floating garbage islands in the ocean could all be reduced if we could just fling everything we didn’t want out into space. But, unsurprisingly, there are plenty of problems with this solution, too!

First off, there’s already a significant amount of trash in the Earth’s upper atmosphere - be it debris from existing satellites, litter leftover from previous rocket launches, or garbage collected via any other means… Even if we somehow shot all our Earthly trash beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, a lot of it could wind up being reeled back in, to darken the skies and contaminate the air. And, if this trash ends up anything like the space debris we’re already contending with, then it’s traveling at a tremendous rate - about 17,500 miles per hour! At those speeds, even large enough specks of paint can be as dangerous as bullets, so imagine the carnage if we just endlessly added to it.

NASA (in cooperation with the Department of Defense) already tracks all of the debris in our atmosphere to make sure it doesn’t collide with anything important - like the International Space Station, or any of our hundreds of satellites. Because of this, we know there are currently around 500,000 gumball-sized bits of debris in orbit around our planet… and countless thousands more that are smaller… Were we to release our garbage into the sky as well then, tracking the trash would become an impossible task. Even worse, it’d be a compounding issue that would only ever get more and more out of hand, because when bits of debris crash into other bits of debris, or something like a satellite - like in 2009, when a broken Russian satellite collided with a functioning US one - the result is yet more debris added to the atmosphere, and a therefore even higher chance of another collision; a phenomenon also known as the Kessler Effect. In a bid to rid the world of trash, we’d have effectively suffocated ourselves with it… and indefinitely halted our future space travel plans in the process. Not good!

One solution? Perhaps we could just send it even further away? For some, we should be setting our sights toward the sun. Theoretically, it’s a far less risky manoeuvre, as the toxins and overflows released back into space as a result of incineration at the sun would probably never be a problem for us back here on Earth. Needless to say, though, this would be the ultimate case of “out of sight, out of mind”. Our actions would still be contaminating space, which poses 1) a major ethical concern and 2) a genuine legal issue. While space laws laid out by documents like the Outer Space Treaty are constantly debated, all space agencies are required to do everything they can not to contaminate space. Few things would more obviously defy that than throwing trash into the centre of the solar system.

The cost is another major stumbling block, though. Sending anything into space demands millions of dollars… but, while estimates vary, sending a planet’s worth of trash on a long-distance route to the sun could cost trillions of dollars a day… making it a far, far too expensive option to currently pursue. And, even if we did have the money to fund such a mission, we don’t yet have the technology to get that much weight into space in the first place.

If we could get it into space but couldn’t get it to the sun, one final space-based trash solution could rely on Lagrange points - places where the gravitational influence of two larger bodies (the Earth and the moon, perhaps) exert just the right balance of force to ensure that smaller objects stay in place. In this way, we’d effectively be building “trash satellites”, naturally held together by gravity. Again, though, there are problems. Because what happens when one of these well-formed “trash balls” becomes too big? Or we eventually find ourselves with too many smaller ones? If any or all of them were to break apart for any reason, we’d see all of that trash released out into space - including some that would rain back down through Earth’s atmosphere, disintegrating to release the toxins we’d originally tried to avoid.

There’s no doubt that we need to develop ways to rid our world of the trash we’ve created… but sending it into space just isn’t the answer. At least, not with our current, limited understanding of the solar system, nor with our current technological capabilities. If anything, the problem highlights just how important it is to choose recyclable or biodegradable products whenever possible… because, right now, we can’t even look to the stars in our struggle to dispose of anything else. And that’s what would happen if we dumped our trash in space.