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[cloudman]

Alright, so this lunch I had a very goo discussion with Justin, Natalie, and Rachel about oil, the planet's future, garbage, and other stuff too. The thing that we disagreed on most and peaked my interest the most was the garbage issue. I'm gonna try to give both sides as objectively as possible. Justin and I felt that, once it became

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Too... tired...

[anonymous]

I'm too tired to actually think about this in much depth but one thing that crossed my mind is that if we're sending matter out away from space - even if it's just trash - what if it becomes a problem in the sense that we're sending away... oh nevermind, I don't think it would be a problem.

I was thinking how in some countries that send mostly agricultural goods away for export, it becomes a problem to renew the nutrients in the soil. Most of the nutrients get taken out of the soil and put in the agricultural product itself (bananas or coffee or whatever). In a natural cycle those nutrients would go back into the soil when the plant dies and the cycle of plant life continues. But when you're constantly taking the best and most nutrient-rich part of an ecosystem out and sending it to some other part of the world, you end up with pretty nutrient-poor soil and that's a problem.

But I don't think Earth is going to miss too much of it's trash. I mean sure, the metal we use to blast the trash out into space and all the fuel is gone forever, sent out of Earth's orbit. And maybe we wouldn't want to do that too much... but also how are you going to send it? We're retiring the space shuttle because launching satellites that way is waaay to expensive and more importantly it is totally ecologically unsustainable. We'd have to have some pretty environmentally friendly rockets to make it worthwhile.

I looked into how the Dutch deal with their waste problem because they don't have enough land to use for landfills. They passed a law that said no more than about 2% of all refuse can be put into landfills. The rest either has to be recycled or incinerated. Then they have big recycling programs that are mandated by law (all of ours in this country are voluntary, you know the whole $.05 deposit thing). The incinerated stuff is burned at such a high temperature that it doesn't even produce smoke, and the heat generated is used to generate electricity. Very clean indeed! Forget space, we just need some smart politicians! Or maybe we need a smarter society to vote for smarter politicians?

- Ariel