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In Switzerland, in some Cantons, there is a trash tax. You pay roughly 1-2 USD the small taxed trash bag. So at the current trend it will literally become cost

In Switzerland, in some Cantons, there is a trash tax. You pay roughly 1-2 USD the small taxed trash bag. So at the current trend it will literally become cost efficient to send our trash to space in a few years.

malux85 6y ago
https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
blacksmith_tb 6y ago
Trash is full of valuable materials! Right now it may not be economical to recover those, but I would be surprised if we aren't mining our landfills in the next 100 years. That said, the CO2 emissions from launching anything non-essential into orbit are huge, I'd wait until we have a space elevator to (intentionally) throw trash into space.
- Dumblydorr 6y ago
  I'm interested to see what's viable to send to orbit now. Can a solar shade be put up which blocks light from hitting our poles and prevent some climactic change? How about rocketing asteroids back to LEO for processing into valuable minerals?
  - blacksmith_tb 6y ago
    Geoengineering projects will probably require a lot of haggling in committees, mining asteroids does seem to have some momentum (pun intended)[1] though I would personally worry about moving some big metallic asteroid to LEO, wouldn't want to make any mistakes... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining#Proposed_mining_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining#Proposed_minin...
- RyJones 6y ago
  I was just watching a video where they made the claim that the slag from steel production 100 years ago has more metal than some ores, so it's becoming worthwhile to re-mill slag.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Video games have largely misled us here. Iron ore is incredibly common, it’s not a rare resource at all. The limiting factor for steel production has historically been energy, not ore, and in the modern context the ability to produce pure oxygen for carbon reduction. Historically iron mines were put near forests for fuel, not wherever the richest ore was. The advantage of re-using slag isn’t that it’s richer in metal, iron oxides being pretty easy to get, it’s that it would take less energy or Oxygen to finish refining. Recommended reading: Bret Devereaux’s blog series about iron & steel production. https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-mining/ https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
    - xyzzyz 6y ago
      It might also be that slag might be closer to smelters than ore, reducing transport costs.
      - ashtonkem 6y ago
        That also seems quite likely. That or slag is much lighter per lb of refined product, reducing the transit cost. Iron ores are incredibly common, but they’re also very heavy, what with them being literally rocks.
        RyJones 6y ago
        of course I can't find the original video I was watching, but since the slag is directly outside the steel mill, transit is about as low as it could get. If you search on YouTube for "deskulling slag pot", you'll find a bunch of videos showing slag trains going maybe a couple miles from the mill to a pit to deskull?
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    I wonder how much silver comes from recycling old copper, lead and zinc. Only about a quarter of « new » silver comes from silver mines. The rest as a byproduct of other mineral mining where they separate out the silver. https://www.globalxetfs.com/silver-explained/ https://www.globalxetfs.com/silver-explained/
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Trash isn't full of valuable materials though. It's full of food (mostly water by weight I guess) and paper and plastic with a little bit of other stuff mixed in.
  - blacksmith_tb 6y ago
    True, I was being hyperbolic (oof, the pun material is just too good). But the organics pretty much take of themselves, leaving behind just the bits we might want to reuse. Of course, we could be composting the organics and reusing them now, my city does that, though they give the compost away to any takers, which suggests the economics are still a work in progress.
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      Right, I understood you were exaggerating and replied because the energy investment will probably never make sense if the goal is material recovery (a landfill is the worst ore for anything interesting). It might happen for other reasons like remediation or whatever.
  - cody8295 6y ago
    Isn't water a valuable resource?
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      Not really no. Clean water is valued where it is scarce, but it is relatively cheap to conjure (expensive desalination costs $0.004 a gallon). In a modern landfill it already gets recovered (there's a liner underneath, so they have to have a way of dealing with water).
- bgroat 6y ago
  Or a rail gun. My understanding for why we don't use those for spacecraft is because people and fine machinery can't take the Gs. Trash could.
  - mabbo 6y ago
    The main issue with concepts like rail guns and what-not for orbital launches is atmosphere. Your atmospheric drag is a function of velocity squared times the density of the atmosphere- a very non-linear function of how close to the ground you are. Rockets have a huge advantage in that they go slow near the ground, where the atmosphere is thick. They're not dealing with as much air resistance. As they reach altitudes with less atmosphere, they can throttle up. This saves a lot of fuel, mass, energy. A rail gun, however, can only add velocity, energy, at the beginning, and will slow down every moment for the rest of the launch. This is the worst possible condition. You're at your highest velocity while you're in the thickest part of the atmosphere. You'd need to put an incredible amount of extra energy into the system because of that. So maybe you put the end of your rail gun on the top of a very high mountain. But the construction costs, the transportation costs, all of this, probably makes it simpler to just use rockets instead.
  - adolph 6y ago
    See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon [Edit] Also the German V-3. An important note is that the V3 and Babylon (unsure of HARP) were designed to have multiple charges go off as the projectile proceeded down the barrel, which gives an acceleration profile more like a railgun than a traditional cannon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-3_cannon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-3_cannon Solid-fuel rocket boosters were used instead of explosive charges because of their greater suitability and ease of use. These were arranged in symmetrical pairs along the length of the barrel, angled to project their thrust against the base of the projectile as it passed. This layout spawned the German codename Tausendfüßler ("millipede").
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
VRay 6y ago
I dunno if environmentalists are going to want to send all our trash into LEO
centimeter 6y ago
I can't stand stuff like that. There's no way the actual negative externality of a small bag of trash is $2. If I lived in a place with a ridiculous rule like that, I would be more inclined to protest the rule by dumping illegally than going along with it. Trash disposal here is great; free unlimited household trash disposal if you drive it to a dump, with only larger things like tires and mattresses costing money (but a very reasonable amount, like $2/tire).
- huhtenberg 6y ago
  Swiss trash bag fees pay for garbage collection and improvements to the recycling infrastructure. They aren't meant to offset the damage to the Earth or some abstract puffery like that.
  - blt 6y ago
    Paying by the bag is good. In the USA, if you live in a detached house there's normally a fixed price to get a large barrel collected weekly. The barrel is large enough to hold a week's trash from a family of four who puts no effort into reducing trash output. If you live alone and are conscious about generating trash, you get ripped off.
    - sonotmyname 6y ago
      > In the USA Hold up.. This not only varies by state, but by county and city. Some places have this built in to special assessments on property taxes, some contract with a trash company that collects fees directly, and some are a bit of a free for all with multiple trash companies providing pickup and or/dumpster service (this is more common in rural areas). I had a place up in the mountains where we had to buy special $6 trash bags and haul it to a central dumpster ourselves, and there are those in large cities who have to deal with mob-run collection companies who bribe local politicians for monopoly rights. TLDR; To generalize "In the USA" for something like this is impossible.
      - blt 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dapids 6y ago
I feel a situation like this would almost guarantee a Kessler Syndrome style event.
dugmartin 6y ago
It is $2 a sticker (1 sticker per normal bag, 1.5 stickers for large ones) here in Western Massachusetts, USA and you have to drive your trash and recycling yourself to the "dump" (town transfer station).
Triv888 6y ago
If you keep sending trash to space, earth will disappear

malux85 6y ago

https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/

blacksmith_tb 6y ago

Trash is full of valuable materials! Right now it may not be economical to recover those, but I would be surprised if we aren't mining our landfills in the next 100 years. That said, the CO2 emissions from launching anything non-essential into orbit are huge, I'd wait until we have a space elevator to (intentionally) throw trash into space.

Dumblydorr 6y ago
I'm interested to see what's viable to send to orbit now. Can a solar shade be put up which blocks light from hitting our poles and prevent some climactic change? How about rocketing asteroids back to LEO for processing into valuable minerals?
- blacksmith_tb 6y ago
  Geoengineering projects will probably require a lot of haggling in committees, mining asteroids does seem to have some momentum (pun intended)[1] though I would personally worry about moving some big metallic asteroid to LEO, wouldn't want to make any mistakes... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining#Proposed_mining_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining#Proposed_minin...
RyJones 6y ago
I was just watching a video where they made the claim that the slag from steel production 100 years ago has more metal than some ores, so it's becoming worthwhile to re-mill slag.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Video games have largely misled us here. Iron ore is incredibly common, it’s not a rare resource at all. The limiting factor for steel production has historically been energy, not ore, and in the modern context the ability to produce pure oxygen for carbon reduction. Historically iron mines were put near forests for fuel, not wherever the richest ore was. The advantage of re-using slag isn’t that it’s richer in metal, iron oxides being pretty easy to get, it’s that it would take less energy or Oxygen to finish refining. Recommended reading: Bret Devereaux’s blog series about iron & steel production. https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-mining/ https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    It might also be that slag might be closer to smelters than ore, reducing transport costs.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      That also seems quite likely. That or slag is much lighter per lb of refined product, reducing the transit cost. Iron ores are incredibly common, but they’re also very heavy, what with them being literally rocks.
      - RyJones 6y ago
        of course I can't find the original video I was watching, but since the slag is directly outside the steel mill, transit is about as low as it could get. If you search on YouTube for "deskulling slag pot", you'll find a bunch of videos showing slag trains going maybe a couple miles from the mill to a pit to deskull?
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  I wonder how much silver comes from recycling old copper, lead and zinc. Only about a quarter of « new » silver comes from silver mines. The rest as a byproduct of other mineral mining where they separate out the silver. https://www.globalxetfs.com/silver-explained/ https://www.globalxetfs.com/silver-explained/
maxerickson 6y ago
Trash isn't full of valuable materials though. It's full of food (mostly water by weight I guess) and paper and plastic with a little bit of other stuff mixed in.
- blacksmith_tb 6y ago
  True, I was being hyperbolic (oof, the pun material is just too good). But the organics pretty much take of themselves, leaving behind just the bits we might want to reuse. Of course, we could be composting the organics and reusing them now, my city does that, though they give the compost away to any takers, which suggests the economics are still a work in progress.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    Right, I understood you were exaggerating and replied because the energy investment will probably never make sense if the goal is material recovery (a landfill is the worst ore for anything interesting). It might happen for other reasons like remediation or whatever.
- cody8295 6y ago
  Isn't water a valuable resource?
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    Not really no. Clean water is valued where it is scarce, but it is relatively cheap to conjure (expensive desalination costs $0.004 a gallon). In a modern landfill it already gets recovered (there's a liner underneath, so they have to have a way of dealing with water).
bgroat 6y ago
Or a rail gun. My understanding for why we don't use those for spacecraft is because people and fine machinery can't take the Gs. Trash could.
- mabbo 6y ago
  The main issue with concepts like rail guns and what-not for orbital launches is atmosphere. Your atmospheric drag is a function of velocity squared times the density of the atmosphere- a very non-linear function of how close to the ground you are. Rockets have a huge advantage in that they go slow near the ground, where the atmosphere is thick. They're not dealing with as much air resistance. As they reach altitudes with less atmosphere, they can throttle up. This saves a lot of fuel, mass, energy. A rail gun, however, can only add velocity, energy, at the beginning, and will slow down every moment for the rest of the launch. This is the worst possible condition. You're at your highest velocity while you're in the thickest part of the atmosphere. You'd need to put an incredible amount of extra energy into the system because of that. So maybe you put the end of your rail gun on the top of a very high mountain. But the construction costs, the transportation costs, all of this, probably makes it simpler to just use rockets instead.
- adolph 6y ago
  See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon [Edit] Also the German V-3. An important note is that the V3 and Babylon (unsure of HARP) were designed to have multiple charges go off as the projectile proceeded down the barrel, which gives an acceleration profile more like a railgun than a traditional cannon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-3_cannon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-3_cannon Solid-fuel rocket boosters were used instead of explosive charges because of their greater suitability and ease of use. These were arranged in symmetrical pairs along the length of the barrel, angled to project their thrust against the base of the projectile as it passed. This layout spawned the German codename Tausendfüßler ("millipede").
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

VRay 6y ago

I dunno if environmentalists are going to want to send all our trash into LEO

centimeter 6y ago

I can't stand stuff like that. There's no way the actual negative externality of a small bag of trash is $2. If I lived in a place with a ridiculous rule like that, I would be more inclined to protest the rule by dumping illegally than going along with it. Trash disposal here is great; free unlimited household trash disposal if you drive it to a dump, with only larger things like tires and mattresses costing money (but a very reasonable amount, like $2/tire).

huhtenberg 6y ago
Swiss trash bag fees pay for garbage collection and improvements to the recycling infrastructure. They aren't meant to offset the damage to the Earth or some abstract puffery like that.
- blt 6y ago
  Paying by the bag is good. In the USA, if you live in a detached house there's normally a fixed price to get a large barrel collected weekly. The barrel is large enough to hold a week's trash from a family of four who puts no effort into reducing trash output. If you live alone and are conscious about generating trash, you get ripped off.
  - sonotmyname 6y ago
    > In the USA Hold up.. This not only varies by state, but by county and city. Some places have this built in to special assessments on property taxes, some contract with a trash company that collects fees directly, and some are a bit of a free for all with multiple trash companies providing pickup and or/dumpster service (this is more common in rural areas). I had a place up in the mountains where we had to buy special $6 trash bags and haul it to a central dumpster ourselves, and there are those in large cities who have to deal with mob-run collection companies who bribe local politicians for monopoly rights. TLDR; To generalize "In the USA" for something like this is impossible.
    - blt 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dapids 6y ago

I feel a situation like this would almost guarantee a Kessler Syndrome style event.

dugmartin 6y ago

It is $2 a sticker (1 sticker per normal bag, 1.5 stickers for large ones) here in Western Massachusetts, USA and you have to drive your trash and recycling yourself to the "dump" (town transfer station).

Triv888 6y ago

If you keep sending trash to space, earth will disappear