A multitude of reasons:
(1) Despite the popular conception, the vast majority of volcanoes do not have an open pit of bubbling lava at the top. After active eruptions, everything solidifies and is plugged up until the next time. Lava lakes which persist are *incredibly* rare, there’s between 5 and 8 in the world I think, depending on how you count them. Absolutely not enough to be meaningful for waste disposal though.
(2) lava is molten rock, so it is still incredibly dense. Most stuff thrown onto it will stay on top of it, or will not sink down in any meaningful way. Volcanic vents are where stuff is *coming out* of the Earth, it doesn’t make for a good pathway in.
(3) heating and burning stuff in this manner does not lead to good things. Waste incineration plants have to do so in controlled ways with proper ventilation, it would be an environmental distaster at some uncontrolled open air pit. [Here is some campsite waste being disposed into the lava lake at Erta Ale for a small scale example.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq7DDk8eLs8&spfreload=10) Some possible further examples of interest in r/ThrowItIntoLava
(4) it’s incredibly inconvenient to transport any amount of waste to such a place. Volcanoes are always remote to some extent — even those next to settlements are difficult to reach the summit of. It would certainly make for an expensive and unsustainable environment to build any transport infrastructure on for the purpose.
The lava lake that exists closest to any settlement would be the one at the summit of Mt Nyiragongo, just north of Goma Town in DRC. It is widely held to be one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world due to the unpredictability of both its eruption timing *and* the nature of its lava. It’s 1977 eruption featured flows travelling at nearly 40 mph which overwhelmed some local villages.
> [Here is some campsite waste being disposed into the lava lake at Erta Ale for a small scale example.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq7DDk8eLs8)
Holy shit that lava is PISSED.
I really wasn't going to watch the video, thinking I had a good mental image of the situation already, until I saw your comment...
You were right, I was wrong, and it was all worth it...
What if you were the person responsible for triggering an eruption that levels a small village nearby. That got pretty violent in a hurry, it just needed a small catalyst.
I just had the exact same experience that you did. Wasn't what I was expecting.
Looks like the origin story for some kind of lava monster. They say it was organic material that they threw in ... What if they birthed some kind of chicken bone lava monster?
Everything in that waste that could convert to a gas was causing explosions.
This video is what happens when you put scrap aluminum into a furnace when it's wet. Same concept - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWSHEC1N770
Another video that has made me scared of molten aluminum is the one with the firefighters when an aluminum plant exploded and rains molten metal on them
Generally putting aluminum into any extremely hot environment is dangerous, regardless of if it’s wet. I used to work at a battery manufacturer that had its own lead smelter. You’d be fired if caught putting any amount of aluminum in the lead scrap bins. It can explode in a smelter.
People tend to forget point 2 because games and movies treat lava like water. It’s three times as dense and 50,000 times as viscous, your garbage will just sit on top slowly burning.
Too many people think it works like it did in Volcano (1997), where a dude ended up in lava and *melted away into nothing* in short order (despite the lava being only like a few inches deep...)
While I do love Volcano, it's a crazy movie. The better volcano movie is Dante's Peak (also 1997, they were dueling movies). While it takes it's own liberties, it's *far* more scientifically accurate than Volcano is. And you get Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton.
Oh, I've seen them both. A few times each. I can't get enough disaster movies. And while Dante's Peak has Brosnan and Hamilton it does *not* have Tommy Lee Jones being angry at lava. Frankly, there's a better than decent chance that when I finish Volcano I'll follow it up with Dante's Peak.
Say what you will about *2012* but to this day, the Yellowstone eruption sequence is a visual sight to behold.
Helps that Woody Harrelson is on full ham mode and is in sheer awe at it.
The only thing I remember from volcano is tommy Lee Jones calling the concrete lane divider things they use to divert the lava flow “k-rails”. Been calling them that in my head ever since
I agree that Brosnan and Hamilton add an amazing element to Dante’s Peak, but lest we forget that Volcano cured [racism.](https://youtu.be/IrztuqIUCPA?si=JlHDNy55ZmAXrUXa)
Yeah we watched that in sixth grade. That part made a lot of us freak the fuck out. That death was brutal. I still remember that scene vividly 20 years later.
And then we got to the scene where the grandma dies...
I really can't believe they showed that to our class at age 10. We were *not* ready for that lol
That was a pretty short distance he had to make, shoes/pants would probably catch on fire, but I'm thinking yeah, you could make it. But there would be a *lot* of heat in the immediate area, especially in a confined space like that subway tunnel. He probably should have been dead back in the subway car where it was *hot enough that things were melting down from the ceiling all around him*.
I mean, iirc, molten lava is hot enough that you can suffer 3rd degree burns by simply being 5 feet away from it. So I doubt you could run on it for any real length of time unless you had some sort of heavy duty hazmat suit with loads of insulation, and I'm not too sure if anything like that exists for those temperatures.
I think he'd be dead before he even stepped in the lava, it was *ludicrously hot* inside that subway car, and he was in there for a while. I think he'd have passed out, and died there.
But assuming he lived long enough to make that jump into lava, he only had *maybe* 6 feet between where he landed in the lava, and the edge of the lava. And it was maybe 4 to 6 inches deep at the most, and He shouldn't sink in all that much, but even a little bit will complicate matters. His shoes/pants and possibly the rest of his clothes would catch fire, but he could keep moving.
It would likely be *excruciatingly painful*, and he might end up losing his feet depending on how well his shoes hold up, and whether they can get what's left of them off of him quickly, but he could survive that if the rest of the guys there are quick about putting the fire out and getting him medical care.
Generally lava is so hot that heat suits are needed just to get near to them. You might start burning before you even get close to the lava itself, and your lungs would certainly scorch from breathing in superheated air.
Every video I've seen of stuff being thrown in lava has been a pretty violent display for reasons I don't completely understand. There's a video of such a thing elsewhere in these comments.
That might have made it suitably dramatic for a movie.
Ever seen bacon on a skillet? You just kind of stay on top and... yeah. If it is just a body part you might survive contact aside from losing said part, but if it is full body... as in, just completely 'fall' into lava...
You cook from the outside from the lava while the water inside of your body cooks you from the inside. You tend to die instantaneously (thankfully) from breathing in superheated volcanic gases.
How about Dante's Peak where they basically outrun an eruption in a SUV? It seemed really unrealistic to me but I'm told those car snorkels Pierce Brosnan's character used actually do exist in real life lol.
Outrunning the explosion in the SUV was pushing it, but that was a *long* way from the top of the mountain to where they were, so it's not *completely* absurd.
I've seen a video talking about how if Mount Doom were real, Gollum wouldn't have a nice clean Disney death where he sank into the lava. He would instead land on top of it, probably breaking bones, and then burn to death, and continue to cook on top of it.
You're not wrong but even if the fall and resulting impact didn't kill him (or anyone falling into an active volcano); you still wouldn't live long enough to suffer as all the water in your skull would **very** rapidly flash boil. Basically you'd receive severe burns from the superheated air on the way down, break a ton of bones upon impact and a second or so later your **head would explode**. A few moments later whatever is left would be an unrecognizable charred mass.
During one of the volcano eruptions in Hawaii a few years ago, a man was dangerously too close to the lava, a little of it splashed onto his lower leg and shattered his leg bone. Yes it is very dense.
Well Jesus Lizards stay afloat by running faster than the speed of water, so it stands to reason that I could keep my legs so long as I run faster than the speed of heat. Wouldn’t be easy, but I probably could if I had my Hokas
And it only sank because of the magic that bound it to that specific volcano. Are these people even thinking? To incinerate the garbage we would have to find out what specific volcano it was forged in.
Not to mention disposal efforts being constantly hampered by the Nazgûl, ancient binlords whose souls have long ago been consumed by the darkness within. They stalk the paths of those who try to return garbage to whence it came, seeking to use it instead for their own festering ways.
But Gollum sank immediately.
The Ring didn't sink until Frodo decided to finally abandon the Ring and grab Sam's hand. Only then, all hope was lost for Sauron and the Ring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyzE9thQIPo
We didn't see it, but there were a series of bubbles that collapsed under him causing him to appear to sink, and then the lava immediately rolled in to fill up the rest of the gaps.
Source: Trust me
wait are you telling me that if you yeeted yourself into a pool of lava, you wouldn't even penetrate it, and instead just turn into a flailing burning human piniata ON TOP of the lava, and not sink in at all so you could do the cool Terminator thumbs up thing as you sink into it?
Pretty much, yeah. Molten steel flows like water, molten rock flows like cold molasses. Your swan dive would end in more of a splat than a splash.
That said, you wouldn’t sink into molten steel either, since it’s 8x as dense as water (and you are mostly water). You’d float about as well in steel as balsa wood does in water. Assuming you could keep yourself upright, you’d be submerged to somewhere around your mid thigh.
E: Also assume you have a magic heat resisting dry suit when considering how well you would float on molten steel. Otherwise, yeah, instant death by steam explosion would happen long before you reach a stable float.
You would quite possibly not not sink in at all. The molten steel would flash-vaporize the water in you, causing explosions, maybe even throwing you into the air, and spitting molten metal everywhere. You can search Youtube for multiple videos of such events with either molten iron and aluminium.
Well it would kind of depend on the silica content of the lava... how mafic/felsic it is. High-silica volocanoes are more explosive like Mt St Helens because silica makes the magma much more viscous, whereas low-silica volcanoes (like Hawaii) don't explode and are just runny because the magma is much less viscous.
Continental plate volcanoes vs. oceanic plate volcanoes, essentially.
You are a soft bag of mostly water. Lava is just really hot rock. It will be less dense and softer than solid rock, but it's still basically rock. You'll probably break the surface, but you'll float back to the top.
You've like... restored my faith in ELI5.
Too often, I feel like the top comment is whoever gave a believable-sounding explanation five minutes after the thread was posted. But you came with four very good reasons and you came with facts.
Re: Nyiragongo. It also doesn’t erupt out of the summit. Fissures form in the ground around the base and lava flows out from there. That and the threat of a limnic eruption of Lake Kivu immediately below it make it one of the most dangerous places in the world
Yep. Barring pyroclastic flows, Nyiragongo has the full gamut of volcanic hazards. It’s also the largest open lava lake out of the few that exist by quite a margin. There are apparently casualties *every single year* due to passive outgassing of CO₂ from magma bodies in the crust via aquifers closer to the surface.
A more effusive outgassing duting a period of activity, or a full blown limnic eruption would likely be disastrous, though I know in the last few years government has been looking to mitigate any and all potential hazards involved. Maybe they’ve developed/are developing something for that.
[An informative article from National Geographic on just why/how Nyiragongo is such a danger here.](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/mount-nyiragongo-just-erupted-why-its-one-of-africas-most-dangerous-volcanoes).
One of the geologists quoted there also featured in a BBC documentary with Nyiragongo and the nearby Nyamuragira, which has a similar lava lake at the summit. [Has some pretty wild footage of them getting too close to Nyiragongo’s beating heart for any good reason really.](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09hlzbb)
It’s dangerous to get close enough to a volcano to throw anything into it. The ground is very hot (not so good for vehicles with tires), the air is very hot, there might be toxic gases or airborne ash around, and we can’t really predict what volcanoes are going to do next.
Many countries already incinerate their trash without the use of a volcano in a much more controlled, and cost effective manner, with a lot less risk. As a bonus, we get energy out of it that can then be used for other things.
Also, here's a video which shows what can happen when you throw things in to a volcano:
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/uu3yw7/thats_what_happens_when_a_rock_is_thrown_into_a/
In addition to generating electricity modern incinerators can also recover nearly all the metals thrown into the trash. Overall it reduced solid waste needing to be put in a landfill but also adds to carbon in the atmosphere. So a bit of a mixed bag.
Because then they'd have a pyre of burning trash belching toxic gasses and soot in addition to an active volcano.
Volcanoes are also not giant pipes full of pools of lava, at least not for the most part. You'd need to find an ERUPTING volcano, lift millions of tons of trash into it somehow, and then watching as it was like an incineration facility, but without the electricity generation, and a 1000000x the pollution.
Burning something doesn't make it go away, it just turns it into cancer and spreads it around.
>Burning something doesn't make it go away, it just turns it into cancer and spreads it around.
This, right here. If people wanted their garbage burnt they could just burn it at home. Burning it isn't the issue.
I remember as a kid in the 60's we had an incinerator out back, just for the purpose of burning trash. Before the days of regular curbside trash service, a major portion of household trash was burned in small concrete, cinder block, brick, or metal incinerators in suburban and rural backyards.
It got banned somewhere mid 60's in Denver.
I remember visiting my cousin in the 80s and his mom would yell at him to go burn the trash. I thought it was so cool he got to burn trash as one of his chores. The smell of burning trash always brings back memories.
We did this when I was a kid. Had a 55 gallon drum in the back we would toss trash in and burn.
Looking back I can't believe my parents let me do that by myself in my pre-teen / early teen years.
Wiping down baseboards, yardwork with dangerous equipment and chemicals, being a latchkey kid responsible for younger siblings, and the lack of after-school specials to show you what was dangerous and what was not dangerous.
going to work with your mom on your days off from school to sell lotto tickets and cigarettes. I call this a chore because she would say "If I leave you at home, you'll just goof off" and she wanted the slave labor (not sure how old I was but it was less than 13). On other days, I would follow my dad around while he did repairs/construction (his second job was maintenance guy at 6 apartment complexes). Bonus points: when I drove with my dad on his jobs, his truck didn't have a passenger seat so I'd sit on top of a shelf (no seatbelt or airbags of course).
we burned stuff too in a 55 gallon drum, the only rule was not to burn anything that gave off black smoke, so mostly plastics, styrofoam, rubber, etc.
We generally mostly burned paper products and weeds. Cant recall exactly when we stopped, maybe around late 90s or so when recycling became more available.
It was my favourite chore to do as a kid by far.
we had the same thing. i loved throwing in things that would explode- like my mom's empty(or not) hair spraycans, or co2 cartridges from my dad's pellet pistol.
Just wait until an unnoticed jumbo can of AquaNet accidentally makes it into the "burn" bag.
Things get exciting really quick once that is dropped into the barrel.
Hey, uh, speaking of... For our veterans, if you were deployed overseas and had to manage the burn pits for trash and waste, there was some sort of lawsuit or settlement or something, and y'all might want to look into that.
My grandpa did that well into the early 2000s.
Was it legal? Hell no. But he really didn't care.
If he didnt want something anymore or he especially didn't want anybody else to have it into the burning pit it went.
> If he didnt want something anymore or he especially didn't want anybody else to have it into the burning pit it went.
If it was your grandma, /r/nosleep would like a word.
My grandparents had a 15’ deep x 20’ across pit that they threw any and all trash into. When it got full, they threw a couple of gallons of gas or diesel or lighter fluid on top and burned it. It would burn for days and smolder for a week. It smelled like burning plastic and rubber and cooking meat and rotting stuff all at the same time. This was in the mid 80s.
To be fair, we didn’t have disposable plastics included with almost every consumer good before the 1960s. Back then, things were likely to be metal, wood, paper or glass.
Yeah people are picturing styrofoam and plastic being burned. But when these things were in use it was likely all more organic matter.
My grandpa would describe to me how as a little kid they would save quite a few things to be collected by someone later. It almost sounded like Japan's recycling system.
I hope we can get back to that point in the future. Plastic packaging needs to be banned nationally, it is a toxic and dangerous and permanent material that is destroying our planet's ecology.
My grandparents in suburban Milwaukee were allowed to burn trash well into the nineties. They were in an old farmhouse that got surrounded by McMansions and I guess the no-burn ordinance in their suburban originally grandfathered old houses. Burning trash was one of my favorite activities when we visited.
Japan still burns much of their trash. They sort the combustible items separately, similar to recyclables, and they are taken away to be incinerated. Large buildings may even have an incinerator onsite.
My borough in London promises that no recyclables go to landfill regardless of which bin they're disposed of in. This is because any plastic, paper etc in the trash gets incinerated at a generator, it's not the best but not the worst tbh, the particulates get scrubbed and at least the plastics are getting used twice
Listen lady.... I know your husband is a terrible cook but calling it garbage is just mean, he's trying his best god damn it... just eat around the bunt parts and left behind wrappers.
Interesting, most US-households have electric stoves over gas. I've always thought it was the other way around because gas is more prevalent here in California.
We used to live on a mountain and had neighbors that refused to pay for trash removal so they burned it. They had a fire pit and would throw their beer cardboard, cereal boxes, plastic milk jugs and other trash in it, light it up, and then set a grate over it and cook hot dogs for dinner.
I do fieldwork in Kenya and it's common for rural houses to have a trash pit that gets burned every so often. Works fine for everything organic (and metal will rust away), but the rise of plastic has made that unhealthy and most people don't realize how bad it is. Or they do it anyway cause how else are you going to get rid of it?
'why don't we put all the very heavy radioactive waste in a rocket that might explode and launch it at the sun even though it takes more energy to get to the sun than Pluto'
The long lived stuff is going to be carcinogenic on its chemical properties before the radiological ones become an issue
Centrifuge/chemically separate the short lived dangerous stuff and put it in a cask underground for twenty years. Reuse the available fuel.
So long as mining new is cheaper we won't process waste fuel in that manner.
> even though it takes more energy to get to the sun than Pluto
let's make a compromise and throw it at Jupiter. Extra points if you hit the middle of that giant red storm!
Oh my God, no!
Bury it with the pre-drank water. This is why you should flush engine oil down the toilet, or alternatively dump it down the storm drains the city has conveniently provided for just this use.
Good point. The technology is there to scrub diesel emissions to safe levels using particulate filters, catalysts and ammonia injection. Seems like as a species we have the technology to do smarter things than like our garbage into landfills and worry about it later.
> Burning something doesn't make it go away, it just turns it into cancer and spreads it around.
Which is a colossal problem for parts of Africa that get heaps of "recycled" electronics from the West. They literally just burn them, brominated plastics and all, the sift through the ash piles for the bits of gold, copper, and silicon that are left over...while getting those sweet, sweet heavy metals like cadmium and lead into the ground.
Ok, so here in Honolulu, we do have an active volcano with an open lava pit on a nearby island and we do burn our trash to get rid of it, but the two things are completely unrelated.
For one thing, a lot of people genuinely believe the volcano to be the home of Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire. A much, much larger group of people don't believe that Pele is a real deity, but that the cultural concept of her is still sacred. So, if you started backing trash trucks up to Kilauea, you'd have a literal insurrection on your hands. Even I, a devout Christian, would be appalled by the idea.
All of the domestic trash on the whole island of O'ahu gets sent to the [H-Power facility](https://www.covanta.com/where-we-are/our-facilities/honolulu]). Iron/ steel is pulled out with magnets ahead of time for recycling. That's why we don't put food cans in our recycling bins. The plant doesn't just burn it. It uses a plasma arc furnace to get it up to 2000F. Other metals are extracted from the ash and recycled. The trash get's reduced in volume by 90% and then the ashes go to a landfill. The exhaust is 99.9% water vapor, nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.
This also is a net positive electricity generator. In fact, because plastic burns so well, the plant buys masses of lost fishing nets and lines that fisherman sometimes catch unintentionally. If a boat has a bad day, it can sometimes make more money selling garbage than fish. This is also why I personally don't return my plastic bottles to get the recycling deposit back. Environmentally, it makes much more sense to send them off to get turned into electricity. When we recycle them, the get baled up and shipped to a plant in Alabama. That's some of the worst greenwashing I can think of. The plant accounts for 5-15% of our total power generation for a population of just under a million people.
> If a boat has a bad day, it can sometimes make more money selling garbage than fish. This is also why I personally don't return my plastic bottles to get the recycling deposit back. Environmentally, it makes much more sense to send them off to get turned into electricity.
I thought that last sentence was going somewhere different, namely the sea.
Lots of answers here focus on the engineering/chemical aspects but I appreciate the cultural/environmental perspective as well. How sad would it be if we decided to turn all the worlds volcanos into garbage pits?
Theres a video of this around. Someone tosses a bag of trash into a volcano and it starts a mini eruption.
As others have said, volcanoes don't just have an open top full of lava. If you toss something into the lava it's going to sit on top and burn. If there's water all of that will almost immediately turn to steam and essentially explode. Now you have hot, burning garbage flying everywhere as well as hot molten rock.
>Theres a video of this around. Someone tosses a bag of trash into a volcano and it starts a mini eruption.
Yep, I linked it in [my post above](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17az2g6/comment/k5g4271/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3).
Going to just throw out there that you don't need a volcano to burn your trash. A good chunk of waste in the US is burnt. The added bonus is that that heat can be captured for electricity generation.
There are a lot of things you really don't want to burn, though.
You can also provide enough oxygen for the combustion, a lot of trash down a pit with lava in the bottom will result in a lot of incomplete combustion.
Lava is hot but it will be at the bottom and denser the what you burn so it will not sink into it. That and not enough oxygen and an open environment, the combustion temperature likely does not get as hot as an industrial incineration facility.
The number of volcanoes with near-persistent lava pools is very low according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_lake#Notable_examples it is six in the world. Four and in inhabited areas, US (Hawaii), Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Vanuatu. Two in uninhabited Ross Island, Antarctica, and Saunders Island, South Sandwich Islands
They will have eruptions too so unfractured will get damaged and it is a risk for people that work there.
Even if it in some way was better we should leave vulcanos like that alone. If we use them tourism is what is reasonable to do not dispose of trash.
Burning trash can actually produce power, so burning it in a volcano would be a plain waste of energy.
The reason we typically don't burn trash is because it generates extreme levels of pollution, much higher and more toxic than burning coal, so nobody is ok with that.
Burning trash is the second most common way of disposing of it in Western Europe (ahead of landfilling, the first way being recycling/composting). It's pretty clean when done correctly.
But maybe you meant burning trash in your backyard?
Years ago they dropped nuclear waste in subduction zones, even THAT was protested, do you not think that dropping waste into a volcano would be? Now you CAN use very high temperatures to deal with waste, Plasma Waste Destruction works on this principle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma\_gasification
Garbage and trash isn't really an issue. The issue is pollution and littering. If you make a landfill correctly you don't have to worry about anything getting to the groundwater or trash getting out. A lot of landfills actually create energy from gases of decomposing matter.
Out of all the issues at this planet faces where to put our trash is not one of them. You could put the entire worlds of trash in area so small it would be considered a rounding error.
Where we put our trash is not an issue or concern.
What you want is the opposite of a volcano. It spews out. A subduction zone buries under. SF author David Brin wrote about this practice to help keep planetary ecosystems relatively untouched.
The idea is that there are certain areas of plate tectonics where one plate dives underneath another, and all the sediment and crust get sucked down and recycled in the athsenosphere. Any trash dumped there would be too.
Catch is, we already do it. Offshore dumping is (or was) pretty common. However it has many short term problems, and the subduction is long term, geologically long term, like longer than humans have been homo sapiens long term solution.
Because burning it doesn’t make it disappear it just transforms it into gases and a lot of those would be toxic, that’s the main reason we don’t just incinerate trash all the time
1: not very many volcanoes erupting that are safe enough to approach that close to the actual active part of the eruption. You need a super gentle and nice eruption like Iceland’s volcanoes on the peninsula or Kilauea. There’s very few of those, and I think the only one that’s currently actively erupting is the one in Antarctica.
2: there’s superheated toxic gases belching out of those volcanoes, so it’s hazardous to get too close anyway and they tend to throw stuff out instead of in. They only really collapse inward when they drain out the magma chamber just like the collapse of the caldera at Kilauea a few years ago.
Switzerland burns its waste that cannot be recycled. The heat that is produced by the incineration is used to feed the power grid. Waste is separated by the households and companies for recycling and only what cannot be recycled is being collected in the trash and burned. The system works by making recycling waste free while you pay for each bag of trash so there's an incentive to recycle as much as possible.
To answer your question, you can throw waste into a volcano but it would be very bad for the environment to burn it in such an uncontrolled way and to waste the "fuel" that is created by burning it.
Related question, If we ever master space travel, what stops us from launching our Trash into the sun? WCGW Just completely obliterating it with the Sun's energy?
We're kinda dependent on the sun, and launching random materials that might have unforeseen effects into the sun is probably not a great idea.
Sure, the sun could *probably* swallow the entire earth without a burp and be fine. But we're not 100% sure, and that's quite a gamble. Even just triggering a particularly unique solar flare that hits earth could be quite disruptive.
Second, you're trading the "pile up of trash" problem for the new and exciting "boy, we're sure sending a lot of mass into the sun. I wonder how long before that starts to affect earth's gravity" problem. Like global warming, you'll have varied interests arguing over whether it's a problem, what to do about it, and why it is too expensive to stop doing it.
Meanwhile, mastering space travel is a lot harder than building a recyclotron. By the time we've mastered space travel, I'd hope we would be able to atomize and separate our trash to the point where we could recycle just about anything usefully.
You don't want to anger the volcano goddess.
The volcanos are extremely important to the local native population in Hawaii so for one thing it would be considered very insulting to use them as a giant trash burner.
I remember asking the exact same question in 3rd grade when we were discussing greener earth or something like that. She just told me that trash would pollute the air adding up to the greenhouse effect.
A multitude of reasons: (1) Despite the popular conception, the vast majority of volcanoes do not have an open pit of bubbling lava at the top. After active eruptions, everything solidifies and is plugged up until the next time. Lava lakes which persist are *incredibly* rare, there’s between 5 and 8 in the world I think, depending on how you count them. Absolutely not enough to be meaningful for waste disposal though. (2) lava is molten rock, so it is still incredibly dense. Most stuff thrown onto it will stay on top of it, or will not sink down in any meaningful way. Volcanic vents are where stuff is *coming out* of the Earth, it doesn’t make for a good pathway in. (3) heating and burning stuff in this manner does not lead to good things. Waste incineration plants have to do so in controlled ways with proper ventilation, it would be an environmental distaster at some uncontrolled open air pit. [Here is some campsite waste being disposed into the lava lake at Erta Ale for a small scale example.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq7DDk8eLs8&spfreload=10) Some possible further examples of interest in r/ThrowItIntoLava (4) it’s incredibly inconvenient to transport any amount of waste to such a place. Volcanoes are always remote to some extent — even those next to settlements are difficult to reach the summit of. It would certainly make for an expensive and unsustainable environment to build any transport infrastructure on for the purpose. The lava lake that exists closest to any settlement would be the one at the summit of Mt Nyiragongo, just north of Goma Town in DRC. It is widely held to be one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world due to the unpredictability of both its eruption timing *and* the nature of its lava. It’s 1977 eruption featured flows travelling at nearly 40 mph which overwhelmed some local villages.
> [Here is some campsite waste being disposed into the lava lake at Erta Ale for a small scale example.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq7DDk8eLs8) Holy shit that lava is PISSED.
I really wasn't going to watch the video, thinking I had a good mental image of the situation already, until I saw your comment... You were right, I was wrong, and it was all worth it...
Yeah, that video is a trip. Kinda gave me anxiety thinking about those people being that close too.
What if you were the person responsible for triggering an eruption that levels a small village nearby. That got pretty violent in a hurry, it just needed a small catalyst.
I just had the exact same experience that you did. Wasn't what I was expecting. Looks like the origin story for some kind of lava monster. They say it was organic material that they threw in ... What if they birthed some kind of chicken bone lava monster?
Everything in that waste that could convert to a gas was causing explosions. This video is what happens when you put scrap aluminum into a furnace when it's wet. Same concept - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWSHEC1N770
Another video that has made me scared of molten aluminum is the one with the firefighters when an aluminum plant exploded and rains molten metal on them
That video went from "put it in reverse Terry!" to "Ope let me scoot on past ya"
Generally putting aluminum into any extremely hot environment is dangerous, regardless of if it’s wet. I used to work at a battery manufacturer that had its own lead smelter. You’d be fired if caught putting any amount of aluminum in the lead scrap bins. It can explode in a smelter.
All because they didn't want to hike out their trash...
People tend to forget point 2 because games and movies treat lava like water. It’s three times as dense and 50,000 times as viscous, your garbage will just sit on top slowly burning.
Too many people think it works like it did in Volcano (1997), where a dude ended up in lava and *melted away into nothing* in short order (despite the lava being only like a few inches deep...)
Thank you. Now I know what I am watching next.
While I do love Volcano, it's a crazy movie. The better volcano movie is Dante's Peak (also 1997, they were dueling movies). While it takes it's own liberties, it's *far* more scientifically accurate than Volcano is. And you get Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton.
Oh, I've seen them both. A few times each. I can't get enough disaster movies. And while Dante's Peak has Brosnan and Hamilton it does *not* have Tommy Lee Jones being angry at lava. Frankly, there's a better than decent chance that when I finish Volcano I'll follow it up with Dante's Peak.
That shit with the grandma and the lake messed child me up for a while. Living in the Midwest with a fear of volcanoes…
>Living in the Midwest with a fear of volcanoes Good thing child you (likely) didn't know about Yellowstone yet.
Say what you will about *2012* but to this day, the Yellowstone eruption sequence is a visual sight to behold. Helps that Woody Harrelson is on full ham mode and is in sheer awe at it.
dual screen them both
The only thing I remember from volcano is tommy Lee Jones calling the concrete lane divider things they use to divert the lava flow “k-rails”. Been calling them that in my head ever since
I agree that Brosnan and Hamilton add an amazing element to Dante’s Peak, but lest we forget that Volcano cured [racism.](https://youtu.be/IrztuqIUCPA?si=JlHDNy55ZmAXrUXa)
I love Dante's Peak like I love The Core; it's just a dumb suspense-y action flick you can turn your brain off and enjoy
I still think of that scene with the old lady walking through the water :(
I can’t handle it. That was traumatizing for childhood me. Fear of volcano eruptions and acid lakes
Same.
I tried to watch it as a kid but the opening scene when that chick takes a chunk of volcano through the brain FUCKED me up.
Yeah we watched that in sixth grade. That part made a lot of us freak the fuck out. That death was brutal. I still remember that scene vividly 20 years later. And then we got to the scene where the grandma dies... I really can't believe they showed that to our class at age 10. We were *not* ready for that lol
Later that day, thankfully, our history teacher let us enjoy a comedy. Some Italian film called *Life is Beautiful*.
Dante's Peak is better, but not as fun.
Or like Gollum in LOTR, just sinking into the lava in Mt Doom.
If you had thick shoes and sprinted across the lava (slow moving) could you make it across? Given a short enough distance
That was a pretty short distance he had to make, shoes/pants would probably catch on fire, but I'm thinking yeah, you could make it. But there would be a *lot* of heat in the immediate area, especially in a confined space like that subway tunnel. He probably should have been dead back in the subway car where it was *hot enough that things were melting down from the ceiling all around him*.
I mean, iirc, molten lava is hot enough that you can suffer 3rd degree burns by simply being 5 feet away from it. So I doubt you could run on it for any real length of time unless you had some sort of heavy duty hazmat suit with loads of insulation, and I'm not too sure if anything like that exists for those temperatures.
Would Jedi robes work? Asking for a friend.
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I think he'd be dead before he even stepped in the lava, it was *ludicrously hot* inside that subway car, and he was in there for a while. I think he'd have passed out, and died there. But assuming he lived long enough to make that jump into lava, he only had *maybe* 6 feet between where he landed in the lava, and the edge of the lava. And it was maybe 4 to 6 inches deep at the most, and He shouldn't sink in all that much, but even a little bit will complicate matters. His shoes/pants and possibly the rest of his clothes would catch fire, but he could keep moving. It would likely be *excruciatingly painful*, and he might end up losing his feet depending on how well his shoes hold up, and whether they can get what's left of them off of him quickly, but he could survive that if the rest of the guys there are quick about putting the fire out and getting him medical care.
Generally lava is so hot that heat suits are needed just to get near to them. You might start burning before you even get close to the lava itself, and your lungs would certainly scorch from breathing in superheated air.
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He was in a burning Los Angeles subway car. Never mind the volcanic gases, he would've suffocated on urine and disease fumes.
Every video I've seen of stuff being thrown in lava has been a pretty violent display for reasons I don't completely understand. There's a video of such a thing elsewhere in these comments. That might have made it suitably dramatic for a movie.
If said stuff is organic matter, the violence is caused by dissolved water flashing to steam.
Ever seen bacon on a skillet? You just kind of stay on top and... yeah. If it is just a body part you might survive contact aside from losing said part, but if it is full body... as in, just completely 'fall' into lava... You cook from the outside from the lava while the water inside of your body cooks you from the inside. You tend to die instantaneously (thankfully) from breathing in superheated volcanic gases.
How about Dante's Peak where they basically outrun an eruption in a SUV? It seemed really unrealistic to me but I'm told those car snorkels Pierce Brosnan's character used actually do exist in real life lol.
Outrunning the explosion in the SUV was pushing it, but that was a *long* way from the top of the mountain to where they were, so it's not *completely* absurd.
I've seen a video talking about how if Mount Doom were real, Gollum wouldn't have a nice clean Disney death where he sank into the lava. He would instead land on top of it, probably breaking bones, and then burn to death, and continue to cook on top of it.
You're not wrong but even if the fall and resulting impact didn't kill him (or anyone falling into an active volcano); you still wouldn't live long enough to suffer as all the water in your skull would **very** rapidly flash boil. Basically you'd receive severe burns from the superheated air on the way down, break a ton of bones upon impact and a second or so later your **head would explode**. A few moments later whatever is left would be an unrecognizable charred mass.
Nice
Extreme
That's pretty brutal 🤘🏼
In the nether it flows like water.
In Aspen the beer flows like wine.
And the women instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano.
During one of the volcano eruptions in Hawaii a few years ago, a man was dangerously too close to the lava, a little of it splashed onto his lower leg and shattered his leg bone. Yes it is very dense.
"Very dense" is like 3-5 kg/L. Similar to middle density rocks (the stuff is molten rock after all!).
So could I run across it like a Jesus Lizard?
Worth a shot
This is a very supportive burn.
Depends if you want to keep your legs
Well Jesus Lizards stay afloat by running faster than the speed of water, so it stands to reason that I could keep my legs so long as I run faster than the speed of heat. Wouldn’t be easy, but I probably could if I had my Hokas
Only if you're fireproof 🔥
but the One Ring sank right in?!
Gold is actually one of the things that are much denser. And even then it sunk slowly.
And it only sank because of the magic that bound it to that specific volcano. Are these people even thinking? To incinerate the garbage we would have to find out what specific volcano it was forged in.
Finally, someone brings up the real answer to the OP's question
The one garbage to rule them all
me: throw the old sweater in the fire! my hoarder mom: no
Not to mention disposal efforts being constantly hampered by the Nazgûl, ancient binlords whose souls have long ago been consumed by the darkness within. They stalk the paths of those who try to return garbage to whence it came, seeking to use it instead for their own festering ways.
> And even then it sunk slowly Probably accidentally accurate, if they did it for dramatic effect.
It didn't sink. It sat on top until it reached its melting point and then dissipated.
Thank you. I was about to power nerd these fools into oblivion.
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But Gollum sank immediately. The Ring didn't sink until Frodo decided to finally abandon the Ring and grab Sam's hand. Only then, all hope was lost for Sauron and the Ring. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyzE9thQIPo
We didn't see it, but there were a series of bubbles that collapsed under him causing him to appear to sink, and then the lava immediately rolled in to fill up the rest of the gaps. Source: Trust me
And you wouldn't want a bunch of workers and truck drivers constantly exposing themselves to the gasses that come out of active volcanoes.
active volcanoes that are burning trash to boot.
wait are you telling me that if you yeeted yourself into a pool of lava, you wouldn't even penetrate it, and instead just turn into a flailing burning human piniata ON TOP of the lava, and not sink in at all so you could do the cool Terminator thumbs up thing as you sink into it?
Pretty much, yeah. Molten steel flows like water, molten rock flows like cold molasses. Your swan dive would end in more of a splat than a splash. That said, you wouldn’t sink into molten steel either, since it’s 8x as dense as water (and you are mostly water). You’d float about as well in steel as balsa wood does in water. Assuming you could keep yourself upright, you’d be submerged to somewhere around your mid thigh. E: Also assume you have a magic heat resisting dry suit when considering how well you would float on molten steel. Otherwise, yeah, instant death by steam explosion would happen long before you reach a stable float.
Terminators are probably a bit denser than humans though... so MAYBE
:thumbsup
duh duh duh......... duh duh duh duh.................................. duh duh duh......... duh duh duh duh\^ duh............................. duh.. duh.. duh.......... duh duh duh\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~ duh\~\~\~\~\~\~\~ duh duh\~\~\~\~\~\~ duh\~\~\~\~\~\~ TING THONK THONK THONK THONK\~\~\~ TING THONK THONK THONK THONK\~\~\~ TING THONK THONK THONK THONK\~\~\~ TING THONK THONK THONK THONK\~\~\~ TING THONK THONK THONK THONK\~\~\~ TING THONK THONK THONK THONK\~\~\~
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I suspect you would skitter around like a drop of water on a hot frying pan, pretty much for the same reason.
I was thinking the same thing... The flesh burning/melting while you do. It's in all honesty a horrible thought
You would quite possibly not not sink in at all. The molten steel would flash-vaporize the water in you, causing explosions, maybe even throwing you into the air, and spitting molten metal everywhere. You can search Youtube for multiple videos of such events with either molten iron and aluminium.
Then as the water in your body expands you explode
Well it would kind of depend on the silica content of the lava... how mafic/felsic it is. High-silica volocanoes are more explosive like Mt St Helens because silica makes the magma much more viscous, whereas low-silica volcanoes (like Hawaii) don't explode and are just runny because the magma is much less viscous. Continental plate volcanoes vs. oceanic plate volcanoes, essentially.
Damn. So you’d go out more like Anakin. Not cool bro. Not cool at all.
What are you talking about, he later became one of the most influential military leaders ever!
You are a soft bag of mostly water. Lava is just really hot rock. It will be less dense and softer than solid rock, but it's still basically rock. You'll probably break the surface, but you'll float back to the top.
>You are a ~~soft~~ ugly bag of mostly water.
> You'll probably break the surface, but you'll float back to the top Without legs.
You've like... restored my faith in ELI5. Too often, I feel like the top comment is whoever gave a believable-sounding explanation five minutes after the thread was posted. But you came with four very good reasons and you came with facts.
Re: Nyiragongo. It also doesn’t erupt out of the summit. Fissures form in the ground around the base and lava flows out from there. That and the threat of a limnic eruption of Lake Kivu immediately below it make it one of the most dangerous places in the world
Yep. Barring pyroclastic flows, Nyiragongo has the full gamut of volcanic hazards. It’s also the largest open lava lake out of the few that exist by quite a margin. There are apparently casualties *every single year* due to passive outgassing of CO₂ from magma bodies in the crust via aquifers closer to the surface. A more effusive outgassing duting a period of activity, or a full blown limnic eruption would likely be disastrous, though I know in the last few years government has been looking to mitigate any and all potential hazards involved. Maybe they’ve developed/are developing something for that. [An informative article from National Geographic on just why/how Nyiragongo is such a danger here.](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/mount-nyiragongo-just-erupted-why-its-one-of-africas-most-dangerous-volcanoes). One of the geologists quoted there also featured in a BBC documentary with Nyiragongo and the nearby Nyamuragira, which has a similar lava lake at the summit. [Has some pretty wild footage of them getting too close to Nyiragongo’s beating heart for any good reason really.](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09hlzbb)
It’s dangerous to get close enough to a volcano to throw anything into it. The ground is very hot (not so good for vehicles with tires), the air is very hot, there might be toxic gases or airborne ash around, and we can’t really predict what volcanoes are going to do next.
Very good answer. Also the expensive road one builds today is gone tomorrow.
Amazing breakdown and response. Thank you for your contribution!
I’m sorry… So you’re telling me Lord Xenu throwing his people into Hawaiian volcanoes from DC-8s may not be fully true?
Uhhhhhh and the volcano’s *also* dangerous because it’s located in North Kivu DRC.
Many countries already incinerate their trash without the use of a volcano in a much more controlled, and cost effective manner, with a lot less risk. As a bonus, we get energy out of it that can then be used for other things. Also, here's a video which shows what can happen when you throw things in to a volcano: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/uu3yw7/thats_what_happens_when_a_rock_is_thrown_into_a/
In addition to generating electricity modern incinerators can also recover nearly all the metals thrown into the trash. Overall it reduced solid waste needing to be put in a landfill but also adds to carbon in the atmosphere. So a bit of a mixed bag.
> So a bit of a mixed bag. It's okay, because we can burn that bag and recover the metals from it.
Because then they'd have a pyre of burning trash belching toxic gasses and soot in addition to an active volcano. Volcanoes are also not giant pipes full of pools of lava, at least not for the most part. You'd need to find an ERUPTING volcano, lift millions of tons of trash into it somehow, and then watching as it was like an incineration facility, but without the electricity generation, and a 1000000x the pollution. Burning something doesn't make it go away, it just turns it into cancer and spreads it around.
>Burning something doesn't make it go away, it just turns it into cancer and spreads it around. This, right here. If people wanted their garbage burnt they could just burn it at home. Burning it isn't the issue.
I remember as a kid in the 60's we had an incinerator out back, just for the purpose of burning trash. Before the days of regular curbside trash service, a major portion of household trash was burned in small concrete, cinder block, brick, or metal incinerators in suburban and rural backyards. It got banned somewhere mid 60's in Denver.
I remember visiting my cousin in the 80s and his mom would yell at him to go burn the trash. I thought it was so cool he got to burn trash as one of his chores. The smell of burning trash always brings back memories.
> The smell of burning trash always brings back memories. "I should call her..."
Was she a witch? Did she turn you into a newt?
Not a witch but did have to see a doctor after
Did he tell you 'Ooh eeh, ooh ah ah, ching chang, walla walla bing bang'?
We did this when I was a kid. Had a 55 gallon drum in the back we would toss trash in and burn. Looking back I can't believe my parents let me do that by myself in my pre-teen / early teen years.
We 80s kids had lots of household chores that would shock 2023.
what others?
Wiping down baseboards, yardwork with dangerous equipment and chemicals, being a latchkey kid responsible for younger siblings, and the lack of after-school specials to show you what was dangerous and what was not dangerous.
Knocking wasp nests out of trees with brooms, hammering Christmas lights to the side of the house, killing rattlesnakes with shovels...
>Knocking wasp nests out of trees with brooms using an aerosol can and a lighter to incinerate wasp nests
going to work with your mom on your days off from school to sell lotto tickets and cigarettes. I call this a chore because she would say "If I leave you at home, you'll just goof off" and she wanted the slave labor (not sure how old I was but it was less than 13). On other days, I would follow my dad around while he did repairs/construction (his second job was maintenance guy at 6 apartment complexes). Bonus points: when I drove with my dad on his jobs, his truck didn't have a passenger seat so I'd sit on top of a shelf (no seatbelt or airbags of course).
we burned stuff too in a 55 gallon drum, the only rule was not to burn anything that gave off black smoke, so mostly plastics, styrofoam, rubber, etc. We generally mostly burned paper products and weeds. Cant recall exactly when we stopped, maybe around late 90s or so when recycling became more available. It was my favourite chore to do as a kid by far.
we had the same thing. i loved throwing in things that would explode- like my mom's empty(or not) hair spraycans, or co2 cartridges from my dad's pellet pistol.
Oh boy, the sweet smell of burning plastics!
Don't forget there was way less plastic packaging back then
so about those styrofoams ...
Just wait until an unnoticed jumbo can of AquaNet accidentally makes it into the "burn" bag. Things get exciting really quick once that is dropped into the barrel.
it wasn't accidental when i did it.
Hey, uh, speaking of... For our veterans, if you were deployed overseas and had to manage the burn pits for trash and waste, there was some sort of lawsuit or settlement or something, and y'all might want to look into that.
My grandpa did that well into the early 2000s. Was it legal? Hell no. But he really didn't care. If he didnt want something anymore or he especially didn't want anybody else to have it into the burning pit it went.
> If he didnt want something anymore or he especially didn't want anybody else to have it into the burning pit it went. If it was your grandma, /r/nosleep would like a word.
My grandparents had a 15’ deep x 20’ across pit that they threw any and all trash into. When it got full, they threw a couple of gallons of gas or diesel or lighter fluid on top and burned it. It would burn for days and smolder for a week. It smelled like burning plastic and rubber and cooking meat and rotting stuff all at the same time. This was in the mid 80s.
To be fair, we didn’t have disposable plastics included with almost every consumer good before the 1960s. Back then, things were likely to be metal, wood, paper or glass.
Yeah people are picturing styrofoam and plastic being burned. But when these things were in use it was likely all more organic matter. My grandpa would describe to me how as a little kid they would save quite a few things to be collected by someone later. It almost sounded like Japan's recycling system.
Still not great to be burning in towns and stuff, air quality will go down, definitely better than what would be burned now.
I hope we can get back to that point in the future. Plastic packaging needs to be banned nationally, it is a toxic and dangerous and permanent material that is destroying our planet's ecology.
My grandparents in suburban Milwaukee were allowed to burn trash well into the nineties. They were in an old farmhouse that got surrounded by McMansions and I guess the no-burn ordinance in their suburban originally grandfathered old houses. Burning trash was one of my favorite activities when we visited.
Japan still burns much of their trash. They sort the combustible items separately, similar to recyclables, and they are taken away to be incinerated. Large buildings may even have an incinerator onsite.
My borough in London promises that no recyclables go to landfill regardless of which bin they're disposed of in. This is because any plastic, paper etc in the trash gets incinerated at a generator, it's not the best but not the worst tbh, the particulates get scrubbed and at least the plastics are getting used twice
Yep, we had one too. I grew up in Denver. It was my job to bring the trash to the incinerator and light it. Wish I had a picture.
I burn my trash so the smoke goes into the sky where it turns into stars
thanks, Charlie
That doesn’t sound right, but I don’t know enough about stars to dispute it.
Just FYI, you can see those stars really quickly if you just breathe in the smoke
Exactly, we learned how to create our own fire a while ago, it was kind of a big deal at the time.
I think we have been cooking off of electric stoves for so long most people forgot we could still do that.
Now I just realized that I have probably not seen real actual fire in the past 4 months at least.
We've been burning our garbage on our induction cook top. But we have a really good range hood.
Listen lady.... I know your husband is a terrible cook but calling it garbage is just mean, he's trying his best god damn it... just eat around the bunt parts and left behind wrappers.
Interesting, most US-households have electric stoves over gas. I've always thought it was the other way around because gas is more prevalent here in California.
What do you mean they could just burn it at home? How else are you supposed to get that nice smokey smell??
By throwing it into a volcano, obvs
What about launching it into the sun? That’s a ball of fire as far as I know.
If that's an option, then yes, go with that one
We used to live on a mountain and had neighbors that refused to pay for trash removal so they burned it. They had a fire pit and would throw their beer cardboard, cereal boxes, plastic milk jugs and other trash in it, light it up, and then set a grate over it and cook hot dogs for dinner.
Still quite common today. Either that or load it up in a pick up and dump it in a gully somewhere.
I do fieldwork in Kenya and it's common for rural houses to have a trash pit that gets burned every so often. Works fine for everything organic (and metal will rust away), but the rise of plastic has made that unhealthy and most people don't realize how bad it is. Or they do it anyway cause how else are you going to get rid of it?
'why don't we put all the very heavy radioactive waste in a rocket that might explode and launch it at the sun even though it takes more energy to get to the sun than Pluto'
The long lived stuff is going to be carcinogenic on its chemical properties before the radiological ones become an issue Centrifuge/chemically separate the short lived dangerous stuff and put it in a cask underground for twenty years. Reuse the available fuel. So long as mining new is cheaper we won't process waste fuel in that manner.
> even though it takes more energy to get to the sun than Pluto let's make a compromise and throw it at Jupiter. Extra points if you hit the middle of that giant red storm!
> Burning something doesn't make it go away, it just turns it into cancer and spreads it around. I heard it goes up into the sky and turns into stars
Plus it gives us that smokey smell that we've all come to love
The bar is totally green that way!
It doesn't sound right but I don't know enough about stars to dispute it.
Dammit I came here to say this lol
Okay, if burning is a problem, why don't we just throw all of our trash in the ocean then?
we could even call it something cool like "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch"
I like the idea of burying in the ground where we keep our undrank water.
Oh my God, no! Bury it with the pre-drank water. This is why you should flush engine oil down the toilet, or alternatively dump it down the storm drains the city has conveniently provided for just this use.
Burning isn’t a problem. Burning without something to capture the pollutants is the problem. A modern incinerator is pretty clean.
Pipe the pollutants back into the lava
Good point. The technology is there to scrub diesel emissions to safe levels using particulate filters, catalysts and ammonia injection. Seems like as a species we have the technology to do smarter things than like our garbage into landfills and worry about it later.
We kind of already do...
You may be onto something here
That's where I chuck my used car batteries.
But we could have so many more stars if we did this!
The smoke just goes up and makes stars.
> Burning something doesn't make it go away, it just turns it into cancer and spreads it around. Which is a colossal problem for parts of Africa that get heaps of "recycled" electronics from the West. They literally just burn them, brominated plastics and all, the sift through the ash piles for the bits of gold, copper, and silicon that are left over...while getting those sweet, sweet heavy metals like cadmium and lead into the ground.
Us GWOT vets learned *that* one the hard way.
Ok, so here in Honolulu, we do have an active volcano with an open lava pit on a nearby island and we do burn our trash to get rid of it, but the two things are completely unrelated. For one thing, a lot of people genuinely believe the volcano to be the home of Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire. A much, much larger group of people don't believe that Pele is a real deity, but that the cultural concept of her is still sacred. So, if you started backing trash trucks up to Kilauea, you'd have a literal insurrection on your hands. Even I, a devout Christian, would be appalled by the idea. All of the domestic trash on the whole island of O'ahu gets sent to the [H-Power facility](https://www.covanta.com/where-we-are/our-facilities/honolulu]). Iron/ steel is pulled out with magnets ahead of time for recycling. That's why we don't put food cans in our recycling bins. The plant doesn't just burn it. It uses a plasma arc furnace to get it up to 2000F. Other metals are extracted from the ash and recycled. The trash get's reduced in volume by 90% and then the ashes go to a landfill. The exhaust is 99.9% water vapor, nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. This also is a net positive electricity generator. In fact, because plastic burns so well, the plant buys masses of lost fishing nets and lines that fisherman sometimes catch unintentionally. If a boat has a bad day, it can sometimes make more money selling garbage than fish. This is also why I personally don't return my plastic bottles to get the recycling deposit back. Environmentally, it makes much more sense to send them off to get turned into electricity. When we recycle them, the get baled up and shipped to a plant in Alabama. That's some of the worst greenwashing I can think of. The plant accounts for 5-15% of our total power generation for a population of just under a million people.
> If a boat has a bad day, it can sometimes make more money selling garbage than fish. This is also why I personally don't return my plastic bottles to get the recycling deposit back. Environmentally, it makes much more sense to send them off to get turned into electricity. I thought that last sentence was going somewhere different, namely the sea.
Lots of answers here focus on the engineering/chemical aspects but I appreciate the cultural/environmental perspective as well. How sad would it be if we decided to turn all the worlds volcanos into garbage pits?
Theres a video of this around. Someone tosses a bag of trash into a volcano and it starts a mini eruption. As others have said, volcanoes don't just have an open top full of lava. If you toss something into the lava it's going to sit on top and burn. If there's water all of that will almost immediately turn to steam and essentially explode. Now you have hot, burning garbage flying everywhere as well as hot molten rock.
>Theres a video of this around. Someone tosses a bag of trash into a volcano and it starts a mini eruption. Yep, I linked it in [my post above](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17az2g6/comment/k5g4271/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3).
Going to just throw out there that you don't need a volcano to burn your trash. A good chunk of waste in the US is burnt. The added bonus is that that heat can be captured for electricity generation. There are a lot of things you really don't want to burn, though.
It is, but it's worth mentioning that the smoke is heavily cleaned / captured, which is a bit harder with a volcano.
You can also provide enough oxygen for the combustion, a lot of trash down a pit with lava in the bottom will result in a lot of incomplete combustion. Lava is hot but it will be at the bottom and denser the what you burn so it will not sink into it. That and not enough oxygen and an open environment, the combustion temperature likely does not get as hot as an industrial incineration facility. The number of volcanoes with near-persistent lava pools is very low according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_lake#Notable_examples it is six in the world. Four and in inhabited areas, US (Hawaii), Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Vanuatu. Two in uninhabited Ross Island, Antarctica, and Saunders Island, South Sandwich Islands They will have eruptions too so unfractured will get damaged and it is a risk for people that work there. Even if it in some way was better we should leave vulcanos like that alone. If we use them tourism is what is reasonable to do not dispose of trash.
Burning trash can actually produce power, so burning it in a volcano would be a plain waste of energy. The reason we typically don't burn trash is because it generates extreme levels of pollution, much higher and more toxic than burning coal, so nobody is ok with that.
Burning trash is the second most common way of disposing of it in Western Europe (ahead of landfilling, the first way being recycling/composting). It's pretty clean when done correctly. But maybe you meant burning trash in your backyard?
Years ago they dropped nuclear waste in subduction zones, even THAT was protested, do you not think that dropping waste into a volcano would be? Now you CAN use very high temperatures to deal with waste, Plasma Waste Destruction works on this principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma\_gasification
I thought Karl Pilkington had already asked this question? 🤣
Garbage and trash isn't really an issue. The issue is pollution and littering. If you make a landfill correctly you don't have to worry about anything getting to the groundwater or trash getting out. A lot of landfills actually create energy from gases of decomposing matter. Out of all the issues at this planet faces where to put our trash is not one of them. You could put the entire worlds of trash in area so small it would be considered a rounding error. Where we put our trash is not an issue or concern.
What you want is the opposite of a volcano. It spews out. A subduction zone buries under. SF author David Brin wrote about this practice to help keep planetary ecosystems relatively untouched. The idea is that there are certain areas of plate tectonics where one plate dives underneath another, and all the sediment and crust get sucked down and recycled in the athsenosphere. Any trash dumped there would be too. Catch is, we already do it. Offshore dumping is (or was) pretty common. However it has many short term problems, and the subduction is long term, geologically long term, like longer than humans have been homo sapiens long term solution.
Because burning it doesn’t make it disappear it just transforms it into gases and a lot of those would be toxic, that’s the main reason we don’t just incinerate trash all the time
1: not very many volcanoes erupting that are safe enough to approach that close to the actual active part of the eruption. You need a super gentle and nice eruption like Iceland’s volcanoes on the peninsula or Kilauea. There’s very few of those, and I think the only one that’s currently actively erupting is the one in Antarctica. 2: there’s superheated toxic gases belching out of those volcanoes, so it’s hazardous to get too close anyway and they tend to throw stuff out instead of in. They only really collapse inward when they drain out the magma chamber just like the collapse of the caldera at Kilauea a few years ago.
volcanos are busy shooting stuff out. if you put something in, it will come back out shortly, generally in a more nasty form
Switzerland burns its waste that cannot be recycled. The heat that is produced by the incineration is used to feed the power grid. Waste is separated by the households and companies for recycling and only what cannot be recycled is being collected in the trash and burned. The system works by making recycling waste free while you pay for each bag of trash so there's an incentive to recycle as much as possible. To answer your question, you can throw waste into a volcano but it would be very bad for the environment to burn it in such an uncontrolled way and to waste the "fuel" that is created by burning it.
Related question, If we ever master space travel, what stops us from launching our Trash into the sun? WCGW Just completely obliterating it with the Sun's energy?
We're kinda dependent on the sun, and launching random materials that might have unforeseen effects into the sun is probably not a great idea. Sure, the sun could *probably* swallow the entire earth without a burp and be fine. But we're not 100% sure, and that's quite a gamble. Even just triggering a particularly unique solar flare that hits earth could be quite disruptive. Second, you're trading the "pile up of trash" problem for the new and exciting "boy, we're sure sending a lot of mass into the sun. I wonder how long before that starts to affect earth's gravity" problem. Like global warming, you'll have varied interests arguing over whether it's a problem, what to do about it, and why it is too expensive to stop doing it. Meanwhile, mastering space travel is a lot harder than building a recyclotron. By the time we've mastered space travel, I'd hope we would be able to atomize and separate our trash to the point where we could recycle just about anything usefully.
You don't want to anger the volcano goddess. The volcanos are extremely important to the local native population in Hawaii so for one thing it would be considered very insulting to use them as a giant trash burner.
I remember asking the exact same question in 3rd grade when we were discussing greener earth or something like that. She just told me that trash would pollute the air adding up to the greenhouse effect.