There’s no getting around it: Earth has a trash problem. Particularly in the West: we throw away more than two billion – with a “b” – tonnes of the stuff every year, and only a tiny proportion of it ever gets recycled. The rest? Eternal garbage. 

Of course, nobody likes living surrounded by their own refuse – which is why we’re willing to do just about anything to avoid that. We’ve tried burying it; we’ve tried chucking it in the sea. We’ve tried making poorer nations live in it instead, and feeding it to wildlife who then die in terrible pain because of it. But none of these are viable long term, and we’re running out of options.

So, some people – specifically, the readers of Popular Science – have suggested thinking outside the box to solve our garbage problem. And by “box”, we mean… “planet”.

And you know what? It’s a fair question: why don’t we just chuck all our trash into space?

The cost

Hey, remember when Blue Origin sent up a bunch of people into space a few years ago, and some person spent $28 million to be on board only to declare they were “too busy” that day to go to space? You ever wonder why the journey had such a hefty price tag?

The fact of the matter is that, while costs have decreased dramatically in the past few years, getting to space is still an expensive endeavor. The cheapest recent option is probably Falcon 9, which (when it works) comes out at around $1,200 per kilo of payload – and that’s only to reach low-Earth orbit.

Throwing our junk out into space, therefore, is “not cost-feasible at all,” John L. Crassidis, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo, told Popular Science. “You require a lot of thrust and a lot of fuel to do that.”

Which – while we’re on the subject…

The pollution

Look, nobody likes the sight of a massive pile of garbage – but getting rid of it in a way that might straight-up destroy the ozone layer through the massive expulsion of soot and aluminum oxides might not be the best solution.

The environmental impact of rocket launches has “never been that big of a concern or focus because the number of rockets being launched every year was so small,” Christopher Maloney, a research scientist at the NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory, told BBC Future back in 2022. 

“Now if you look at the trajectory of the industry, or proposals from various governments, then we can expect to see a tenfold increase in rocket launches and emissions within the next 10 to 20 years,” he said, “and that is why, suddenly, it’s starting to get momentum in terms of scientific research.”

So, what kind of emissions are we talking about? Well, one analysis of a 2016 Falcon 9 launch found that sending a rocket into space expelled 116 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere… in the first 165 seconds alone. 

That’s one launch. Scale it up to cope with a couple of billion tonnes of trash, and it starts to look a little less eco-friendly than… well, just about anything else.

And that’s assuming it stays up there.

The safety

We’ve been talking about the various costs of sending stuff into low-Earth orbit – but there’s a very good reason that wouldn’t be enough.

“You’ve got to get it away from the Earth’s influence,” Crassidis told Popular Science – in other words, at least 22,000 miles from the surface. Fall short, he warned, and all that garbage will just end up hanging out with a bunch of satellites and space junk – and, eventually, it’ll probably come back down on someone’s roof.

That’s not hyperbole. We’ve all seen the occasional headline of a massive piece of rocket falling out of the sky and into someone’s backyard, and we tend to think of each one as a one-in-a-million chance event. But scientists are already warning of a one in ten chance of rocket debris literally killing someone within the next decade, and a dramatic increase in rocket launches – like, say, if we were trying to send billions of tonnes of crap off-world every year – would only result in a corresponding uptick in debris incidents. 

Even if it stayed in orbit, things could still go haywire. It’s called Kessler syndrome: the nightmare space scenario that, depending on which astrophysicist you ask, we’re either already edging towards – or already watching the start of.

It’s “an idea proposed by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978,” explains the Natural History Museum. “He said that if there was too much space junk in orbit, it could result in a chain reaction where more and more objects collide and create new space junk in the process, to the point where Earth’s orbit became unusable.”

Of course, you may be thinking, there’s an easy answer to that: just send the junk to the moon, or Mars or somewhere, instead. Well, about that…

The logistics

Okay, forgetting about cost, pollution, all those other things for a minute – the moon seems like the perfect solution, right? There’s nobody there; no animals to poison or national parks to screw up. You can’t even destroy the ozone layer, because it doesn’t have one. It’s practically begging to be turned into a dump.

Well, sure – but it depends on how long-term you’re thinking. 

“You definitely don’t want to send [our garbage] around the moon,” Crassidis told Popular Science. “It could crash onto the moon, right? You want our junk to pile up on the moon?”

Okay, so how about Mars? Surely we could cover the red planet entirely in garbage, and the only things that would mind is a couple of lonely rovers and some hypothetical bacteria. But again, Crassidis cautioned that such a plan could eventually backfire: “You’ve got to think 200 years from now,” he said. “Hopefully we’ll be colonizing [Mars]. You don’t want junk there too.”

Of course, there’s always the nuclear option. What if we fired all our garbage right into the sun, like all the memes say?

Look – it might be feasible. One day. But for now, Crassidis told Popular Science, “it’s just beyond cost viable.” 

“First, you got to get all this stuff and put it in a central location, and put that much garbage onto a rocket (that can’t launch that big of a payload), and then send that payload out to the sun,” he explained – pointing out that “you can only launch a certain amount of stuff at a time, right?”

Overall, he suggested, it could cost trillions of dollars to pull off – and that’s not even accounting for all the other problems we’ve already mentioned. So, while in theory it’s a great plan, in practice? There’s just no way it’s happening right now.

Guess we’ll have to stick to recycling for the foreseeable future after all.