It’s great to see that people are thinking positively about ways we can address global warming and I hope you won’t be too disheartened when I tell you that your idea wouldn’t really be practical.
There are several problems that would need to be overcome. First off, if we were to jettison our waste into space then we’d have to transport it far enough away so that Earth’s gravity didn’t cause it to rain back down on us.
That would mean putting it into orbit thousands of miles above Earth, but this is where our satellites are. Something as small as a fleck of paint can cause serious damage to a satellite if it collides with it. We’d have to dispose of our waste even further out into space.
When the Space Shuttle programme was running it cost $450 million per mission according to NASA. With a maximum payload of 23 tonnes this means it would cost about $20 million to get rid of one tonne of waste, roughly the amount that each household produces in a year.
Even if we were to devise an electromagnetic propulsion launching system that launched the waste directly into space the cost would be prohibitive.
If we wanted to go far enough so as to get the Sun to incinerate our waste, then we’d have to go about 70 million miles from Earth, that’s further than it is to Mars. So again it’s not going to be practical.
Getting rid of our greenhouse gas emissions into space is equally problematic.
An average person in the UK is responsible for 9 tonnes of CO2 each year and a further 3 tonnes of other greenhouse gases. In the UK this means that an average household will produce about 30 times the weight of greenhouse gas emissions as it produces from normal household waste. At current rates it would cost NASA some $600 million to take the greenhouse gas emissions from one average UK household into space.
Another problem would be actually capturing the greenhouse gas emissions, it’s not too difficult in factories and power stations but much harder to do when it comes to capturing the emissions from waste water, sewerage, farming, agriculture, or from vehicle exhausts (because of the chemical reaction that occurs when petrol is burned, the weight of the CO2 emissions is more than 3 times the weight of the petrol that’s burned. If the CO2 were captured then the car would get heavier as it drove along).
There are other things we can do which don’t involve going into space. Carbon dioxide can be removed directly from the air through several processes, some of the simplest involve nothing more than planting trees or encouraging the growth of plankton in the oceans. We can also remove it by chemically reacting it with things like sodium hydroxide.
Keep thinking up ideas.
have a read of this, there's a nice little table of pages 2 and 3 showing the cost per lb & kg of putting payloads into low earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit using different launch vehicles.
http://www.futron.com/upload/wysiwyg/Res...
Perhaps for high level radioactive waste. Other than that, the costs and environmental impact would be enormous.
There are human fingerprints on carbon overload.
It would not be cost effective.
I was just reading some global warming article now and thought why can't factories pump there air pollution in space? I don't know anything about this topic at all, but lets say if they were to get the air pollution into space, wouldn't this help our planet with its global warming problem? cause we cant breath in space already so it wouldn't affect us... or get rid of all the rubbish that cannot be recycled and really damages the earth be sent into to orbit to get burnt up from the sun..? I know this would cost millions and millions to do, but would it help us with this global warming issue for a while..i don't know if this can even be possible but I am asking this without all the laws and capital involved....
