What If We Dumped TRASH Into VOLCANOES?

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Transcript

00:00

have you ever found yourself thinking why don't we just toss all our trash into volcanoes I mean if you've ever played Minecraft then you might already be familiar with the concept of dropping stuff you don't need into lava and never having to worry about it again sounds too good to be true doesn't it well you've probably already guessed it but

00:15

it's so often things are not as simple as they seem on the first glance here's the thing we generate an insane amount of trash every year take the United States for example Americans throw away about 239 million tons of garbage annually so yeah finding a way to get rid of all all that would be pretty

00:30

great and tossing it into a volcano sounds like a solid solution right it feels almost like a cheat code to solving the trash problem but it's not as simple as it seems not even close the first issue we'd face is well actually finding a volcano that can handle all that garbage there are only around 1,500

00:45

active volcanoes on Earth and many of them are tucked away in remote areas far from where people actually live so getting our trash to one of those volcanoes would be a logistical nightmare but let's pretend we get that part sorted we load up all our trash and head to the nearest volcano what's next next well not all volcanoes are created

01:01

equal you'd need a very specific kind to even think about this idea what we're looking for is a shield volcano these are the ones with those iconic Lava Lakes and slow steady eruptions the problem is shield volcanoes are relatively rare but for the sake of this thought experiment let's assume we somehow manag to find ourselves a nice

01:18

docel shield volcano you think the hardest part is over right but nope if you're one of the brave souls tasked with delivering the trash to the volcano get ready for some serious danger the environment around the volcano is no joke poisonous gases flying rocks and boiling hot lava it's the kind of place

01:33

you don't want to be hauling a truckload of trash and when it's time to dump it in let's just say things get a bit tricky back in 2002 a group of researchers threw a small bag of trash into a volcano in Ethiopia and what happened next was not exactly expected Lava Lakes it turns out are pretty

01:50

unstable when something cold like trash lands in them it triggers a chain reaction pressurized steam builds up and suddenly you've got an eruption of acidic gases and molten rocks so just imagine what might happen if we dumped an entire country's worth of waste we could end up with a volcano literally

02:07

spitting trash all over the place and that's not even the worst of it even if we somehow avoid an eruption we've still got to deal with the fact that not all trash breaks down in lava metals and other materials might just sit in the lava only to be blasted

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out later on plus let's not forget that burning trash releases a ton of harmful pollutants into the atmosphere so instead of solving the trash problem we might just make the pollution crisis a whole lot worse and shipping all this trash to remote volcanoes yeah that's going to generate a massive carbon footprint the emissions from hauling

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trash across countries would pretty much defeat the purpose of trying to reduce waste in the first place so while tossing trash into volcanoes might sound like a good way to get rid of it all the reality is much Messier if we're really looking to get rid of waste maybe we should stick with recycling or exploring

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better ways to convert waste into usable energy or you know we could always just shoot it all into space if you're interested in why that wouldn't be a good idea either let me know in the comments anyways thanks a lot for watching And subscribe for similar videos in the future hope to see you around