I get that you could not possibly get rid of all of it, but wouldn’t it make sense to send a trash rocket into the abyss?
In: Engineering
Rockets cost a lot of money to send in to space. It would cost more than buying a brand new car to send as much plastic as a 5 year old could fit in their backpack by rocket on a path that will leave the earth. And you need to have a big rocket so won’t just hang out in space near Earth and get in the way of satellites.
Setting cost aside, the amount of plastic waste alone that’s created by NASA in the process of prepping and launching that rocket would be enough to fill more than one rocket more. So it won’t solve our plastic problem, it will only make it worse.
It would be too expensive to send waste into space regularly like space bin men for a start and with there being around 6 billion tons of plastic waste on the planet, there would be no rocket that could take an impacful amount waste off the planet and be cost effective. You would spend billions and barely scratch the service.
We could do a lot more good with it on Earth than to build a rocket to send just a little bit into space. The big problem is collecting it and we’d have to do that anyway. Then rocket launches are expensive and not environmentally friendly either. Overall, it’s a bad idea.
We’d be better off burning the plastic for fuel
The amount of plastics is so great and the amount that rockets can carry is so low that it would be like trying to drain an Olympic pool 1 teaspoon at a time and each teaspoon cost $100M
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