Rubbish - how often it should be collected and a much better alternative - the SUN?

Question

As usual here in England with our typical minimalist and mean attiude towards things - the national debate at the moment that everyone is getting all fired up about is whether or not we should have rubbish collections once or twice a week! Plllllleeeease for crying out loud - where is our imagination and vision not to mention innovation. I always thought necessity was the mother of invention!

For a start - doesn't common sense dictate that from purely health reasons, it should damn well be picked up as quickly as possible - I don't care if it is in strong plastic wheely bins - tell that to the people of Anchorage, Alaska - they've got humping great grizzly bears to contend with - what chance do you think a wheely bin has against a bloody bear. Here in the UK we're not quite so extreme with our wildlife, but foxes all over the country and house martins as well in some parts of our wet little islands don't have a problem with wheely bins either I can assure you!

NO!!! Forget thinking small - minute even - what we need to do is to use Richard Branson's new spaceship technology and build massive purpose build rubbish spaceships and shoot them off to the SUN! You're talking rubbish I here you say? If you were to calculate the costs of all this recycling malarky together with the probably huge transportation and labour costs around the world (China on its own now is becoming a headache!) - surly it would make more sense to try and get some global (or as many countries that would sign up anyway) rubbish gathering business established that then shoots all this unwanted material at the best furnace we know - every single bit of it would be vapourised long before it got anywhere near the sun and you could use this new 'shuttlecock' effect Branson's new spaceships are going to have to re-use the transportation vehicle - they just have to eject the payload somehow on a trajectory toward the sun long before the ship is actually endangered.

Come on - now tell me what's wrong with my plan - or do some of you agree that this just might be possible? I realise it might be a lengthy and possibly costly thing to set up, but surely the long term benefits would be enormous?

If you haven't seen this short movie - I urge you to do so - it's a bit boring in parts - being confronted with Branson's face to explain things (he's on an ego trip - and who could blame him?!!!)- but overall the message is one of magic - we're on the threshold of going to the stars people!!!!

Some more for you to chew on:-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programm...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/spaceshipon...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/burt_rutan...

Burt Rutan had the idea for his spaceship twenty odd years ago, but didn't have the confidence to put it into motion - then one day he thought he'd better get on with it - along came Branson - and the rest is history!

He has actually said if he'd had the confidence to put his idea into motion all that time ago - we'd have had viable spaceships along time ago!

It just goes to show - doesn't it, if you have a dream - you should go for it - shouldn't you?!!!!

People, people! Didn't you read the question? To achieve what I'm suggesting, we need to COLLABORATE with other nations.
Yes, I expect it would be expensive initially - even running at a loss maybe to begin with - but where there's a will there's a way. Since first asking the question, I've considered the enormous logistical problems with round trips to the Sun - surely to overcome some of these problems, we could send some sort of reusable 'drone dumbsters' - by the time they got back - yes we would be alot further along technology wise, but if they did indeed return successfully, it would prove the viability of the idea of sending 'reusable drones' in the first place - wouldn't it? And back to the original problem - we are fast approaching a crisis situation with our rubbish aren't we?

Picking up your wheely bin twice instead of once a week, I can't see frankly how that allievates the overall problem - sending it off to meet a nice hot sun does - once it's organised properly!

Poor One - disappointed you don't have any contact info - I found your answer very interesting indeed - there was a lot of lateral thought in what you said actually, but as you said in so many words people are an emotive lot!!!

Ian I - I like yours aswell - same reasons, but I still feel that the Sun would be a good destination (although you didn't suggest it), I feel sending 'rubbish ship' off in any direction into space would be irresponsible and if we started littering space - who know we might have this kind of situation to deal with:- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfpSXI8_UpY

One of the problems I feel why you 'negatives' answerers may be right at the moment, is because we don't 'harvest' for want of a better word our resource of 'natural intellect'. By that I mean people who've very high IQs - these people often find, because their brains are so much faster than the rest of us, that they 'don't fit in' to normal society - there again, why should they?
Why not try to put them together more easily. Only recently I watched an English documentary about the 'pitfuls' for these type of people - any many cases they're almost treated as pariahs -surely if we really want to get to the stars, which I tend to agree at the moment maybe be a far off dream - we need to start exploiting this resource more - dare I say it - intelligently?

I know places like MIT etc., exist, but I wonder how intimately how focused on certain seemingly impossible issues like inter-stellar space travel these institutions really are!

Don't you have to jump through a certain number of hoops to qualify for these illustrious institutions - surely if you're a genius, you shouldn't have to pass loads of mundane exams to get to the resources to achieve the goals that maybe within one's grasp and that we need to advance our species.

YOU CAN'T REPLACE TIME! Well, you maybe able to - but we need to let the genius among us to find that out - don't we?

I personally hate exams and I'm not gifted, but it doesn't take a huge imagination to realise that someone who is a genius would soon lose interest in having to justify their existence in completing some exam paper which they could probably do a better job (if they were interested) in creating themselves! To hold back genius through fear or jealousy or this obsession we seem to have with the 'status quo', "that's the way we've always done it' - how many times I heard that rubbish - is in my opinion, probably one of the worst sins you can commit in life!

I have erred - I offer my humble apologies - I've been corrected - I should have said PINE MARTINS not HOUSE MARTINS - yes that would be a sight to see wouldn't it - a house martin lifting up the lid of a wheely bin wouldn't it? Well I suppose they could do it as a group - couldn't they? Where's your positve outlook on life - ok - I'll go quietly - yeah that'll be the day!!!!

Answer 1

I think the argument about how to dispose of rubbish is out of date. There is no reason to generate rubbish. If the items are sorted and collected properly, it can all be re-used in some way.

The problem is the governments and local authorities that think they can rule with the stick instead of making it something people want to do.

Answer 2

It costs about US$12000 per kilogram to launch anything into orbit as cargo. Unless you can bring that down to about $1 per kilogram, the average family will not get rid of their rubbish in this way.
I suppose we could make a sling shot apparatus, as long as we get it out of Earth orbit and in the general direction of the sun, gravity should handle the rest. But the amount of rubbish is enormous. Realistically, it would not be feasible. At that cost, it would be much cheaper to find some other use for it, or sort it and recycle the materials.

Answer 3

I'll simplify my answer in as little words as possible since it's late and I'm getting tired -

You suggest launching the garbage into the Sun, are you not? Have you ever thought about all the mathematical equations, the billions of dollars it takes to launch just one rocket into orbit and taken into consideration that even if the rocket does not explode on the launching pad, it could explode in mid-air dropping millions of tons of garbage over 1/3 of the planet?

We already have thousands of space debris from past satellites and rockets still orbiting the Earth, most will eventually burn up in the atmosphere, and soon the Hubble telescope will be allowed to fly off into space once it out-lives its usefulness to NASA, so I can't see any way that sending garbage into space let alone the Sun would be a "solution."
I also don't want to wake up one morning and hear on the news that 50,000 tonnes of someone's waste extract landed on my house, or that a garbage ball is falling back toward Earth like an episode of Futurama.

Answer 4

I read your rant. Oh dear. Firstly, house martins are small birds. They cant lift wheely bin lids. You must be a townie... I know situations vary from area to area, so can only speak from experience. We have 3 wheely bins. General waste, green waste (garden and kitchen waste) and recyclable waste (certain plastics, metal, paper, cardboard). We have fortnightly collections. The only real problem is the green bin gets a bit ripe in summer. When they start to allow compostable plastic bags that will cure that problem. The scheme promotes recycling. End of. Firing rubbish into the sun? It has my vote, only if you go with the first (and only) load.

Answer 5

There's no point launching waste into the sun. If you want to get rid of it, launch it off in any direction away from earth and forget about it. A vastly cheaper and easier solution is to burn it. The heat produced can be used to generate electricity, eg the 'Bolton Thermal Recovery Facility'. Rubbish incinerators aren't more widespread because the general public are afraid of them; believing them to produce toxic emissions or something- based as usual, on no evidence whatsoever.
Our waste management problem is entirely attributable to the idiocy of the government, the local authorities and the general population, as are most problems.

Answer 6

Richerd Branson's new spacecraft can't even get into ORBIT, let alone up to escape velocity to drop into the sun.

While there is not a technical problem with dropping refuse into the sun, it would cost several million dollars a ton. Are you willing to pay that? Me neither.

They have bears in Canada too. In the national parks, they use bear-proof garbage bins. That's a HELL of a lot cheaper than firing trash into space with rockets. Safer, too.

Answer 7

Do you have any Idea what it costs to get an object to even low earth orbit, never mind the change in velocity to get to the sun. Do you you really want to spent a thousand Pounds per kilo to have your rubbish disposed of? For that kind of money you could hire a livered servant to take your rubbish to the tip hourly
(Please forgive my English, I'm one of those bloody yanks)

Answer 8

If removing waste from the planet was ever an option, it would be easier to send it to Jupiter than to the sun. And the folks on Jupiter probably don't care.

Answer 9

We are not on the threshold of going to the Stars. We will not get to any star in your lifetime, or even your grand children's life time. Not at the rate we are going. Any talk that we are nearly able to go to the stars or that we could realistically send millions of tons of trash into the sun is just crazy talk.