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Getting rid of our trash safely and ecologically is going to be quite a challenge in the future,
but they do say one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.
We recently got done with an episode discussing potential options for Climate Change Mitigation
and some of those solutions along with thinking on environmental concerns reminded me that
when I was a kid there was often a lot of news about barges full of garbage wandering
along the coastline looking for places to deposit their unwelcome cargo.
Folks often worried about where we might put all our garbage as landfills got filled.
So I thought we’d take some time today to look at the smellier side of the future, which
is getting rid of our trash, as well as what some of our waste might be in the future.
We’ll also address some of the misconceptions or dubious notions that have been suggested
over the years, and we might as well start with the landfill issue.
Americans have a reputation as being the biggest producers of trash per individual, which is
a debatable statement but we do generate about a ton of waste per person per year, and we’ll
estimate that as about a cubic meter a person and say a future and slightly more prosperous
world of about modern population might generate 10 billion cubic meters of garbage a year.
That’s rather rounded up but helps highlight both how much garbage we might produce and
how that’s not actually a very big number.
If you stacked that in one big square 10 kilometers on a side it would be about 100 meters tall.
That seems big but even if we piled it up for a whole century would only result in a
single decently sized mountain - of which we have around a million Earth.
Indeed we have around 500 million square kilometers of surface area so that mountain full of a
century of garbage wouldn’t even take up a millionth of the planet’s surface area.
Finding space for landfills is about keeping the transport costs low, finding some place
near your garbage-producing areas willing to host a landfill, and making sure it’s
nicely secured against dangerous leakage.
It’s not a space issue.
We’ve also got the common suggestion we should dump all our waste in the Sun, which
is pretty bad idea.
It takes a ridiculous amount of energy to get stuff into space and more to get it out
of Earth’s gravitational field.
It would be energy-cheaper to tear the stuff down to the atomic level and centrifuge it
into raw materials you could re-use, with the added benefit of having those materials
still, rather than losing them into the Sun.
Of course, as we’ve noted in our Starlifting episode, you can mine a star, but it’s rather
backwards to dump material into one for later extraction.
This is more effective incidentally if you’re dumping it into black holes, since you can
reap huge amounts of power by throwing the materials down there, where they obviously
are safe from leaking harmful materials elsewhere, and they eventually give you all the objects
mass-energy back, but even then recycling matter is probably much preferable.
To be fair, this suggestion is usually in regard to nuclear waste, but the same still
applies, you could separate that material down into just the radioactive isotopes and
safe material, then use both again.
Radioactive waste is mostly useless because it isn’t radioactive enough to be good for
power generation but too radioactive to be left lying around.
That’s all very energy intensive too, which is part of the problem, we aren’t exactly
lavishly supplied with cheap and abundant energy, especially energy that comes without
other environmental and economic problems.
One nice option might be dumping garbage down volcanoes which might also be a nice place
to mine, see our episode “Accessing Earth’s Core”, but isn’t really ideal either,
especially as one of the big costs on waste is transport anyway and we don’t exactly
have volcanoes evenly and frequently distributed across Earth’s surface.
Even if we made artificial ones, MoHo Mines, it’s not the sort of thing you’d want
to close to a city, which of course is where a lot of our trash comes from.
Ultimately though we always come back to the notion that one’s man’s garbage is another
man’s treasure and the general idea of recycling.
That will be even more important in space, where you need to recycle at high efficiency
everything, including your air and water.
This need to efficiently recycle is especially the case on interstellar spaceships.
We’ve discussed the difficulty of keeping people, cultures, ecologies, and equipment
running for centuries on board an interstellar generation ship before, but one big restraint
we tend to bypass a lot in discussion is that your ship will be prone to leaking and that
and recycling process tends to have losses.
If you’re losing 1% of your current mass every year to recycling and leakage, small
as that sounds, it means in 70 years you’d be missing half your mass.
We’ll come back to space and the more distant future in a bit.
How about the near future though, what technologies might come into play?
Well first is automation.
An automated garbage truck eliminates much of the cost of transport and also means you
can get away with multiple pickups of different types of trash to facilitate recycling efforts,
but that still has the problem of requiring people put in effort to separate their garbage.
And it really only takes a small minority not doing this right to cause problems with
that.
At a recycling facility someone needs to monitor the trash and often separate it manually,
not a pleasant job and not cheap process either.
You’ve probably heard that many types of recycling aren’t worth it and cost more
money and effort than disposing of the stuff and harvesting new raw material would take,
and for some things that is true.
Improvements in how much energy is used for recycling, or other things like how much water
is used, can alter this.
Many plastics aren’t recycled simply from the large amount of energy needed for the
task, and if that can be improved, or energy made much cheaper, the dynamic changes.
We have begun to see some major improvements in plastics recycling in the last decade too.
Now, a quick note.
One could argue that what we call recycling is actually rapid recycling.
Any plastic will break down in a landfill given time and we can speed that up with various
treatment or disposal methods.
As mentioned at the beginning, we’ve no shortage of storage space for that.
One might think simply throwing energy at the problem if we had an abundance of it might
be a good idea, however if you can grow your feedstock for plastics using less overall
energy and resources than by recycling, that would be the better path.
The same applies with wood for instance.
It seems wrong somehow to dump such materials in a landfill to decay while growing a forest
or field to use as the feedstock for paper or bioplastics but in some cases that might
turn out the more efficient path.
For the moment at least we receive a huge free bonus of sunlight to power such processes
and in some cases it may be more economical and environmental to toss it in a landfill
and harvest new stock, one could think of this as slow recycling if it’s more appealing,
since those landfills can eventually be reused, and all the sooner if you’re sorting and
disposing safely and strategically.
Of course a lot of recycling isn’t economical right now simply because of the manpower needed
to do that sorting, and as mentioned a moment ago, collecting and separating trash is neither
a cheap nor pleasant job.
However, we’re getting a lot better with both robots and identification algorithm.
For all the jokes about AI that will see pictures of cats and identify them as dogs.
If your recycling facility has the detection gear and robotics to sort your trash automatically
and at high speed, suddenly it becomes much easier and cheaper to recycle by type.
Even just a capacity to recognize logos or imprints that tell you something is a soda
can or paper coffee cup helps quite a lot, and we’ve seen that developed in the last
few years by folks like AMP Robotics and the Clarke robot.
Many things which aren’t economical currently can suddenly become very economical with even
minor improvements of technology and automation might make recycling outright profitable,
which for many things it is not, or is at best marginal.
Ideally we’d like our trash collection and disposition to run at no cost at all.
Right now it does, you end up paying up front or with taxes to get garbage removed, but
if you get good enough at recycling you might have a setup where those fees are minimal
or even negative.
If one person’s trash becomes another person’s treasure, suddenly you get calls from trash
companies offering you bids to pick yours up for payment to you, not the other way around.
Similarly automation is handy on the safety and enforcement end too.
With good automation trash could be identified and documented on pickup or at the facility
and a fine or surcharge issued to anyone who’d improperly disposed of something, which might
discourage bad disposal habits.
If the method was able to be miniaturized and made cheaper down the road, you might
get drones emptying your garbage at home and sorting it into bins and calling for a pickup
of the stuff when a given bin was full.
I don’t think most of us would object to being able to just toss garbage into a trash
can in any given room and not have to deal with it personally anymore.
It all gets sorted and handled far more efficiently and economically and environmentally.
That’s another type of waste of course, Time, our most valuable commodity.
And in more ways than we tend to think too, humans aren’t terribly efficient machines
and we use a rather specialized and inefficient fuel source in the form of our agriculture.
People do need exercise of course but you’re often going to be more efficient letting machines
do the work.
Particularly if it is an activity people don’t enjoy, like picking up trash from the roadside,
something I suspect will be relegated to drones in the next couple decades.
Quite a lot of area beautification is likely to be automated before long and opens the
door to helping out on things like lawn waste and many other secondary wastes like runoff
of water and soil and fertilizer and less healthy things that often get into them.
A pretty big portion of garbage and waste is essentially excess, the last couple bites
or bits of some piece of food or product or things that spoiled or got overused, and that’s
where smarter technology can help a lot too.
We often have to standardize products in the name of efficiency but better and smarter
production can often circumvent that, garbage never generated is garbage you don’t have
to deal with and resources that never have to be produced.
If for instance your smartphone has been tracking your eating preferences and medical data and
you walk into a restaurant it could relay that to the robot doing the cooking that now
knows exactly how big a sandwich and how big a soda you want.
Smart technology is practically synonymous with efficient technology and the more of
it that is in play, the less waste and garbage you’re generating pretty much across the
board, in a thousand tiny little ways.
Robots are of course handy but biotechnology might play a big role in garbage disposal
too, organisms altered to serve as natural dumpsters and recyclers might be very handy.
We’ve had fairly good luck using certain plants and organisms to clean up toxic sites
and may be able to expand on that to make tailored organisms that could take shredded
garbage and break it down into components for re-use, not simply organic and biodegradable
materials but potentially even metals, glass, plastics and ceramics.
Though I’ll add as a caveat that gene-splicing some micro-organism to be able to digest those
could get problematic if it got loose and started digesting our buildings.
Mold is already a bad enough problem with wooden buildings without having some version
of it that ate glass and steel.
There are a lot of strategies for avoiding such problems though, and even if we limited
it to organics, being able to get those removed and the other materials sorted for machine-recycling
would be advantageous.
How about the more distant future though?
Up in space we’ll need to good quite good at recycling, and you can’t dump your trash
wherever you please anyway, since a ship is usually in motion and a soda can tossed out
the airlock of an interplanetary ship is moving fast enough to basically be a grenade if it
ever runs into anything.
Space debris is a real issue and will only be a bigger one as we start developing an
Orbital Infrastructure.
Indeed it was one of the bigger topics in our episode on Orbital Infrastructure a few
years back, and we addressed it more in Megastructure Maintenance & Space Janitors, and the Space
Derelicts & Trash Worlds episodes.
One nice thing about most futuristic economies is they do have energy abundance, especially
for things like producing simple heat, since it’s surpassingly cheap and easy to build
a large solar kiln in space.
It’s not terribly efficient to recycle by raw heat and centrifuge, simply breaking everything
down to the atomic level, but it gets the job done.
This does raise another aspect of recycling though, which is reuse.
We don’t really want to smash stuff up if we don’t have to, certainly not the atomic
level.
You’re recycling your coffee mug whenever you wash it, you don’t need to crush it.
Water and detergent aren’t free but they are cheaper than rebuilding a ceramic mug
from scratch and for that matter, most of us prefer our coffee in such a mug, not a
paper cup, even if just because it holds heat better.
However in an increasingly computerized and miniaturized society we have tiny little components
that are at once very valuable and very fragile and very prone to obsolescence, all three.
It’s a truism that our ancestors tended to use every part of an animal and repair
everything or sell or gift it to another after using it, hand me downs to younger siblings
or kids or even grandkids, while we tend to be prone to disposal.
But it’s very hard to recycle a lot of modern technology for more than its scrap material,
because it is fragile micro-components, because those can’t be easily re-purposed, and because
they are often antique after a few years.
Most households get collections of broken or outdated electronic junk.
It’s quite probable that in the future a lot of electronic technology will plateau
and that lots of smart and small robots might be able to carefully harvest and repair components,
either keeping a device running or cannibalizing those components without having to strip them
down to the raw elements.
This brings us to our last type of garbage for discussion, and that is heat and entropy.
Show regulars know that in a futuristic context everything you do produces heat and heat disposal
tends to be your ultimate bottleneck on civilizations.
You can have all the energy abundance you want, but you can’t use that energy faster
than you can radiate it away or you’ll roast yourself in the heat build-up.
It would be nice to be able to recycle heat, it is energy after all, but this forbidden
by the laws of thermodynamics.
We can use large pockets of concentrated heat – things at high temperature – in conjunction
with reservoirs of lower heat to produce energy we can use but only to a point.
Entropy wins out and slowly reduces everything to a homogenous soup of material of the same
temperature that you can’t extract more energy from.
This is anticipated to be the eventual cause of the End of the Universe, the Heat Death,
essentially us drowning in our own entropic waste and garbage, and postponing or preventing
that is likely to be the ultimate goal of recycling, true 100% efficiency, that any
advanced civilization will focus its efforts for.
See our episode Postponing the Heat Death of the Universe for details.
That though is the final key notion.
Recycling is all about efficiency, and garbage is the antithesis of that, your ideal process
economically and environmentally is one in which the minimum trash is produced and the
minimum energy needed to re-use it productively.
Efficiency is always about eliminating waste as much as possible.
So in our ideal case, when asking what the Future of Garbage is, the answer is that it
wouldn’t have one, that we won’t have any garbage at all.
We were talking today about how we might be able to use advance computation and artificial
intelligence to help us find solutions to our waste and environmental concerns, but
of course it might turn out that artificial intelligence, while it might solve many problems,
may represent a far bigger problems itself, where the cure is worse than the disease,
or is perceived to be.
Whether we abandon such research or survive some sort of machine rebellion, humanity might
find itself trying to continue afterward, and we’ll be exploring that in our new episode
“After AI”, which is out now on Nebula.
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We were speaking about how humanity might survive after abandoning artificial intelligence
and one way we might do that is through genetic or cybernetic enhancement, which might produce
a rather wildly diverging species of humanity, or even new species.
It’s a popular notion in science fiction and many authors have tried to show just how
divergent many worlds separated by many light years can get get when you have a lot of evolution,
mutation, and cybernetics in play, albeit not with much scientific accuracy, and this
Thursday we’ll be taking a more scientific look at how civilizations might begin to diverge
genetically from each other out on distant colony worlds and even back here in the solar
system, in Genetic Divergence & Civilization.
I will be getting married this coming weekend right after that episode, but the show will
still be coming out on Thursday as I got the episodes for our honeymoon done in advance,
so we’ll close April out with another pathway future humanity might follow with a look at
Life as a Digital Being.
However, we will not have our usual End of the Month livestream for April, and will do
our next one at the end of May from our new SFIA studio.
For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,
and if you’d like to support future episodes, you can donate to us at Patreon or our website,
IsaacArthur.net, linked in the episode description.
I’ll also throw in a link for Sarah and I’s wedding registry too for those so inclined.
Until then, thanks for watching,
and have a great week!