![]() Some communities also collect organic wastes, like food scraps and yard trimmings, and turn them into compost – a soil-like material that gardeners and landscapers use as fertilizer. Many towns and cities have made this the rule. If you want to reduce waste in your life, choose reusable mugs, cutlery or grocery bags instead of single-use plastic items. Each step means less waste at the end of the day. You might be familiar with the “3 Rs of trash”: reduce, reuse, recycle. But there are many things people can do to reduce waste in their daily lives. Part of that job is up to governments, which set rules on issues like whether to allow single-use plastic bags. Here’s a much better strategy: Reduce the amount of waste that goes into landfills, incinerators, open dumps on land and the oceans. It wouldn’t be smart to add to this problem. They travel at high speeds, so they can really damage spacecraft in a collision. NASA estimates there are over half a million pieces the size of a marble or larger in Earth’s orbit. There is also a lot of “space junk” already orbiting the planet, including broken satellites and meteor debris. One is the risk: What if a rocket carrying tons of highly radioactive waste exploded on takeoff? Another is the cost, which would be vastly higher than the already high price of storing it safely on Earth. These proposals, though, have never moved forward, for many reasons. It’s true that nuclear waste will remain extremely hazardous for tens of thousands of years, and humans have done a lousy job so far of disposing of it safely on Earth. They’re mainly thinking about used radioactive fuel rods from nuclear power plants. Some researchers have suggested sending waste into space. After all, there’s a lot of room out there, with no one – as far as we know today – to claim it. Sending trash into space isn’t as off the wall as it might sound. Thinking about what a mess we’re making can be pretty overwhelming. It harms plants and soil, and a lot of waste finds its way into the oceans. This exposes people to serious health risks. What’s worse, much of the world’s garbage is mismanaged – dumped on land, in waterways and in open dumps in cities and towns. Globally, people add 350 million tons to this total every day. Much of it is still with us in the form of waste. Since the Industrial Revolution, we humans have produced 30 trillion tons of stuff – from skyscrapers and bridges to clothes and plastic bags. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to we eventually have to send our trash into space if we run out of room on Earth? Aiden, age 13, Maryland Heights, Mo. Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages.
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