this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Currently the best price to low Earth orbit is $1,500/kg. In Seattle (where I happen to live), they charge about $0.18/kg to send trash to a landfill from a waste transfer station, and I assume it's quite a bit cheaper in less crowded places. That's about a factor of 8200 difference, but it gets worse. For one thing you still need to get the trash to a spaceport, which could be thousands of miles away. For another, you can't use LEO for trash because it's way too crowded already. You'd need to put the trash in a much higher orbit, which of course costs quite a bit more money. And if you want to get it out of Earth orbit entirely, well...I don't even know where to look for a price for that, because it's just not normally done.
I really can't imagine a scenario in which launching trash into space is even close to cost effective compared to just burying it. You may say the cost of launching stuff into space will come down, but who's to say the cost of digging holes won't come down just as much?
I can pretty safely assume that the $0.18 figure does not include any measures to contain and reduce damage to the environment done by that trash. The entire point of dumping trash in space would not be that it's cheaper it's that it would be overall better. General rule from life experience is that cheaper usually isn't even close to acceptable in all other parameters.
But yes as things stand now sending trash up is not economical, however by moving industry to space a lot of the trash gets produced in space though so there would be less to shoot up in the first place. Particular heavy industry pollutes like crazy and would benefit from not having to worry about their toxic goop poisoning everything around it.
To add to that, if possible trash should always be recycled. Bio waste can do bio things (I'm not a biologist, idk), Minerals can be reused, and so on.