Putting the science in fiction - Dan Koboldt, Chuck Wendig 2018

Waste management
Sometimes, it really is rocket science

By Gareth D. Jones

A lot of people don’t give much thought to their waste (or rubbish or garbage, depending on where you live). They just throw it out and somebody else takes it away. People are generally more aware of recycling, resource efficiency, and sustainability than they used to be, but still have little idea how that works in practical terms.

Most writers who set their stories in space (or elsewhere for that matter) probably give the topic of waste management little thought, too, unless your story happens to be about the mutating power of toxic waste, but as with many other aspects of everyday life it can be something that appears in the background of your story and add an important detail to the society or ambiance you’re going for.

If you’re writing a story in a postapocalyptic, dystopian, or steampunk setting or in a ruthless dictatorship where slave labor is used for menial jobs, feel free to write anything you like. If you’re writing a story that is contemporary or set in the future, though, it would be nice to see something based on current technology or an extrapolation thereof rather than something hopelessly outdated that makes me want to send you an email and offer to take over the Total Waste Management contract for your galactic empire and bring it into the twenty-first century.

Space junk vs. Renewable resources

We all love the scene in Star Wars with the garbage compactor, and the time the Millennium Falcon hides among the garbage being jettisoned from the super star destroyer. But, we have to ask, could a closed system like a space station or starship, or a society in general, afford to throw away that amount of material into space?

When the U.S.S. Enterprise in the 2013 movie Star Trek Into Darkness turned out also to have a garbage chute to jettison huge quantities of material into space, I watched on in disbelief; not at Kirk and Spock’s highly dangerous flight, but at the ridiculous waste. That material should be recycled onboard or stored up to be returned to a planetary base to be recycled. The cost involved in getting anything into orbit makes it far too valuable to throw away when it could be easily sent back to Earth on a returning shuttle.

The 2008 movie WALL-E was even more preposterous. How could they be throwing that amount of waste into space if the ship was mankind’s only home for centuries? The volume of material being thrown out would probably have amounted to the entire mass of the ship after a few decades. Materials are not infinite. Give some thought to where they came from and where they go when people are finished with them. Please don’t throw your waste out an airlock or have a laser waste bin vaporize it.

Health and safety

In an episode of Dark Matter I half-watched recently, the team were imprisoned on a space station and some of them were sent down to the waste department to work. Here they were sorting the waste for recycling (hoorah!) and sending the rest for incineration. The waste was on a conveyor belt being handpicked. That’s getting rather old-fashioned even now.

Optical and magnetic sorting mean many waste streams can be sorted mechanically, and this would surely improve in the future. Admittedly, this was a punishment detail so it was perhaps deliberately labor intensive. Next, they had to wheel the residual waste on trolleys into a large incinerator room. That was ridiculously inefficient. Of course, somebody then shut the door, locking them in, and turned on the incinerator. Who designed that system? Did nobody carry out a hazard and operability study when they were designing it? What madman would design a system that allows a good chance of death for the operators?

I’ve managed hazardous waste incinerators in the past. Every system has an alarm, a backup, an alarm for the backup, and a backup for the alarm. There are safety interlocks and emergency stops and there is nothing designed to allow the operator to be incinerated. On a related note, boilers and high-pressure steam systems are often a source of peril when somebody jams a valve and the system over-pressurizes and explodes dramatically. Boilers have pressure relief valves that will open to vent steam safely, and if that doesn’t work they have bursting discs that give way under pressure and vent steam in a controlled manner. When you’re designing your Imperial Galactic incinerator, or any other technology, don’t just throw in a convenient way to put your hero in mortal peril. Imagine you’re the system’s designer (which you are) and design it properly. Then come up with a more convincing way to threaten your protagonist.

Landfill

In an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, a murderer admits to having dumped a body in an old quarry. When the CSI team arrive, the quarry has been tuned into a landfill. The operators never found the body because they drained the water and just started throwing waste in. Landfills are not just a hole in the ground. They’re specially engineered with impervious lining, venting systems for gas, and pumping systems for leachate. They would have found the body while constructing the landfill. In some countries, old landfills are now being mined for the valuable materials that were dumped in them for decades: plastics, glass, and metal, including trace amounts of many precious metals that are often present in greater quantities than they are in virgin ore and are much more easily extractable. In fact, precious metals are also being extracted from road sweepings, which contain trace amounts from exhaust catalysts and, bizarrely, from sewage sludge incinerator ash.

Developing countries where huge urban waste dumps are still common will often be crawling with poor, barefoot workers looking for materials to sell for recycling. The efficiency with which this health-and-safety-nightmare of a system works even now is impressive and goes to show that with a little thought, waste can become a resource instead of a liability. Particularly if you’re setting up a colony on a new planet, this kind of resource efficiency and environmental technology would likely be built-in from the start.

Hazardous waste

I’ve been working with hazardous waste for eighteen years and so far it’s failed to mutate me into any kind of superhero. Which is a shame. Mutagenic and teratogenic waste can cause mutations in cells or in embryos, but the other hazards associated with them mean that even if you bathed in the stuff you would likely die from toxins before you were to mutate into a sentient samurai tortoise.

Sadly, radioactive waste doesn’t glow. If somebody has been exposed to radiation and developed radiation sickness, this does not automatically make them radioactive. The kind of radioactive waste I’ve dealt with is Very Low Level waste from research laboratories rather than nuclear power plant waste, but Low Level Waste is much more likely to crop up in real life. X-ray machines and various bits of medical diagnostic equipment contain radioactive sealed sources, which are rather small and potentially deadly.

The important thing to remember about protecting yourself from radioactivity is time, distance, and shielding. Minimize the time you spend in contact, maximize the distance, and get some shielding. I won’t go into all the complexities of half-lives, radionuclides, and the effects of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation, but if you’re going to use radioactivity it’s worth getting an idea of what’s involved.

Biohazardous waste

Biohazardous waste could be a number of things: bodily fluids and body parts, genetically modified organisms, cell samples, agar plates and the like infected with a disease of some kind, gloves and wipes contaminated with biological agents, or needles and other sharps infected with the same. They don’t all automatically require full-body suits to protect you from them, and they won’t all kill you on contact. A lot of research labs and hospitals put their biohazardous waste through an autoclave to kill off anything dangerous, so piles of waste waiting to be collected may already be harmless.

Chemical waste

Chemicals come with a fabulous variety of hazards: corrosive, flammable, toxic, irritant, harmful, spontaneously combustible, oxidising, explosive. Mixing them together can cause dramatic reactions, so generally all of the different hazards are stored separately, even while awaiting disposal. Unless you’re a chemist (which I’m not), it’s very difficult to know which chemical will react in what way, but there are such a huge number of possibilities that it’s worth thinking of some dastardly and original way to feature chemical waste in your plot.

Remember, in the future not everything will be made of plastic, not everything will be disposable, and most things still won’t mutate you into a supervillain. Give some thought to the resources your society consumes and what they do with the waste. And unlike in real life, have fun playing with toxic waste!