There will always be some waste which cannot be avoided or recycled. This is either put into landfill or incinerated. Both landfills and incinerators tend to be opposed by those who live nearby because of smell from landfills and fears of trace toxins (usually dioxin) and the consequent drop in property values from incinerators. But this stuff still has to go somewhere. Simple solution: build waste incinerators on offshore platforms and cart the waste out to them in barges. They don't have to be very far offshore, as long as they're out of sight. By the time any toxic emissions reach land they really will be diluted to insignifigance. This will be an expensive way of getting rid of waste, but it's up to people to decide how much they want to pay to dispose of rubbish: pay X amount per year for an offshore incinerator or save money by building an incinerator on that vacant plot next to the primary school.

I realise this isn't going to be very practical for places which are far from the sea, but I think I read somewhere once that 75% of the world's poulation live within 50 miles of the sea, and most of the world's big cities are on the coast or estuaries.
-- Skinny Rob, Oct 07 2001

How about simply firing our garbage into the sun?
-- mrthingy, Jan 18 2002


As usual, there's a perfectly practical GE solution ignored among all the crazy talk of offshore platforms and rockets to the sun.

I propose that we grow a monstrous new organism, provisionally called Garbantua, to feed on our waste. When it outgrows its glass womb we will stake it outside, secured with ropes, and back garbage trucks into its several vast, reeking, moaning, acid-slopping mouths. Its steam-powered gut will use enzymes and a zoo of microbes to convert garbage into fangs and scales. When it grows too large to control we will take a cutting (for Pantrashuel) and tow it out to sea, where it will certainly drown peaceably and never be heard from again.
-- Monkfish, Jan 18 2002


I think you underestimate how high tech landfills actually are. incinerators might seem like a good idea at first but I just don't like the fact that the waste is always diluted, it just doesn't seem like a solution, I know that dilution is right now the most prefered way of dealing with waste. I think a better option is to build land fills right next to volcanoes so the waste will just get buried in all the lava, or maybe better yet just drop all that waste directly into the volcanoe and let metemorphism do its thing.
-- wood2coal, Jan 19 2002



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