This sanitation company disposes of its waste
by dumping it into the Amazon river.
And unfortunately,
they're not the only ones.
All over the world,
people are treating bodies of water
like they are giant garbage dumps.
And experts say that
continuing these practices
will result in catastrophic damage to marine life.
But what if
we're just not dumping our trash
in water that's deep enough?
What if we dumped our trash
down in the deepest part of the ocean?
The Mariana Trench is a vast crack in the Earth,
deep in the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Its deepest point
is 11 km (6.8 mi) below sea level.
The trench is so big
that we could theoretically keep stuffing
our trash away there for thousands of years.
But only three people have
ever made it down to the bottom of the trench.
So how likely is it
that we could get all the world's
trash down there?
Before we dive too deeply into that,
let's find out how much
trash we're talking about.
We produce over 2 billion
tons of waste every year.
And this is expected to
increase to almost
3.5 billion tons by the year 2050.
To put it in perspective,
that would be 1,000 times the volume
of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
To get rid of the waste,
we've tried things like throwing it into landfills,
and burning it up,
but neither of these are working out too well.
Both landfills and garbage incinerators
release toxins that leach into our soil,
air, and groundwater,
becoming long-term hazards
to our environment, and to our safety.
So it's time to get creative,
and try something new.
And that brings us to the Mariana Trench.
The trench is so vast
that it could hold as much as
970,000 billion tons of waste.
That's enough to allow us to keep
stuffing away the world's trash
for thousands of years.
The pressure in the trench is also very high.
It's comparable to the pressure that a tower
of 2,000 elephants would exert
on a surface smaller than
one square meter (11 square ft)!
We could use that pressure to our advantage,
as it will compress any waste
we put down there.
It would be like when a car crusher
compresses a car.
This would allow us to put
even more trash into the trench!
Now, all we have to do is figure out
a way to get our waste down there.
One option would be to transport
the waste down there using a submarine,
but that would be very expensive.
For comparison, the submarine used
to bring filmmaker James Cameron
to the bottom of the trench
cost USD $10 million,
and only one person could fit in that sub.
A better solution would be to use a pipe system,
similar to the waste pipes
that some construction scaffolds use.
The garbage pipes
would have to withstand the high pressure
of the ocean floor.
And their paths would have to be
carefully planned to account for
different depths along the trench.
But even if we could get
all our trash down there,
would it be a good solution
for our waste problem?
It doesn't matter what part of the ocean
we dump our trash into.
It's still going to cause pollution.
Waste is filled with dangerous metals,
chemicals, and microplastics
that can leak out into its surroundings.
These chemicals and microplastics
could then be passed on to us humans
through the fish we eat,
the water we drink,
and even the air we breathe.
So, rather than finding new places
to dump our garbage,
maybe we could focus on
trying to produce less of it instead.
The zero-waste movement is
already picking up speed.
Can you imagine how quickly our planet
would recover if we produced no waste at all?
Well, that's a story for another WHAT IF.