Garbage. You just can’t get away from it. Not even in Challenger Deep, it seems, the darkest and most distant of all seabeds. Over the course of exploration of this mysterious reach, which started in 1960 but only truly picked up pace in the 2010s and 20s, some discoveries have been made, but among the most disturbing is…well, this. Litter. At the bottom of what one would think is the most isolated and pristine environment in the world.
Now, the deepest place on the Earth’s surface is really not that distant from the realm of man; 35,876 feet sounds like a lot, but it’s only a distance of less than seven miles for litter to traverse (I’m sure a lens wipe I once lost to the wind at Badwater Basin is further afield by now…). Pressure is thought to crush items to a pulp, but in fact certain objects, among them glass bottles such as the one in this post’s featured image, can withstand the pressure fairly easily, as long as it’s evenly applied and increases gradually. If it filled with water when it slipped overboard the thousand atmospheres or so of pressure down there are nowhere near strong enough to crush glass; it would stay intact on its way down, drifting through those seven dark miles.
If it were just glass bottles that would be one thing, but infamously, us humans have littered the entire world with garbage made out of plastic materials that are nigh-indestructible by any natural means. So they will just keep blowing and drifting and floating around in the environment for centuries…millennia…possibly millions of years. And even long after it’s no longer recognizable as garbage a lot of this stuff will have just been disintegrated into micro-plastics that still persist in the environment (albeit more or less harmlessly, in all likelihood, contrary to what the hype suggests).
Nevertheless, it makes one wonder how careless we could possibly have been, to mass-produce virtually indestructible plastic items and then throw them away. In all fairness, most of this stuff ends up in landfills, which in their modern form are rather impressive at containing litter and ensuring it will be absorbed by the ecology harmlessly. But enough blows in the wind that one has to wonder, is there a better way? And that gets me wondering: what would it take for the world to not have been the sort of place where garbage ends up littering Challenger Deep? Where we could take for granted that our ocean floors are as pristine as our best-kept beaches?
Would that be true in the alternate-history-cum-science-fiction universe I write my stories in? Notably, the usual process to dispose of garbage in that universe is to incinerate it…with heat from nuclear reactors. Environmentalists in real life tend to oppose incineration, due to pollution, but sufficiently high temperatures (like what could be achieved by nuclear means) break down even the most toxic materials into its base elements, which tend to be quite harmless, and might even be reusable after processing (!).
In a world where nuclear energy was dominant, abundant, and cheap, it would likely be the go-to; cheap energy makes the effort of landfills seem superfluous, even environmentally irresponsible if the waste can simply be reprocessed or else turned into inert bricks of material, which could even be used in construction. Heck, in my world it’s very normal for even residential structures to be made out of concrete rather than wood, so a lot of this waste material could just be incorporated into a concrete-like slurry that’s mixed into the aggregate. Such processes have actually been proposed in real life, though they’re not widely used.
All very elegant. But this only takes care of the garbage that ends up in landfills, i.e. what’s put in the trash can, which already is basically contained anyway as far as environmental impact is concerned. The really nasty stuff is packaging, wrapping, and various small light items which slip out into the wind and out of the grasp of the user, much of which will indeed end up in the oceans…and fall to the bottom as litter.
This whole scenario is of course the source of much interest in biodegradable materials, but an issue in our world is biodegradable polymers usually don’t have the desirable properties their inert counterparts do: they’re just noticeably less useful. With sufficiently advanced chemistry and perhaps bioengineering that problem could be solved, in all likelihood. But what would be the angle at which you’d attack the problem to make sure that litter that lasts forever never proliferates in the first place?
My cursory research suggests that paper- and cellulose-based films would be the best materials to use to make sure that yes, you can hold onto your croissant in sanitary fashion, but if it slips out on the wind, it’ll biodegrade within a few years, even in deep ocean water (and on a far faster timescale on land). Nothing else comes close to its desirable properties: degradable yet also useful for everyday packaging and wrapping purposes. Indeed paper-based films were what was used historically before the advent of modern plastics for this purpose (and infamously is currently mandated in some areas to be used for grocery bags instead of plastic).
In a more science-fictional context, by my world’s more advanced 21st century, you could see something like smart cellulose packaging laced with genetically-engineered bacteria that activate under UV or in the presence of water, consuming itself from within. But that’s really just a variation on a theme.
I wonder anyway if plastics as we know them would ever have even been common in my science-fictional universe. Consider that electronics casings, almost always made out of plastic today, are in that world made out of wood, glass, and metal; plastic in general is deemed “cheap” and ugly, never coming into fashion for any sort of consumer goods. Instead natural, or at least natural-seeming, materials are favored…which tend to biodegrade far better.
Consider also that if incineration becomes common even before the nuclear era begins in the mid 20th century, it might be that plastic is deemed incompatible with early thermal decomposition standards: infamously, plastic materials are far harder to burn in a non-toxic way than their more natural counterparts, and so might be discouraged by the waste-processing sector. For a world where waste is burned and then reprocessed, paper and wood are far better feedstocks than any form of plastic.
Even the cheap or modern materials in this world might be something like reprocessed exotic woody material, which would have a sleek and modern and minimalist but more natural-seeming look. Easy to produce with cheap abundant nuclear energy too: even something like synthesizing gasoline out of air and water becomes trivial, so woody or organic polymers that are highly biodegradable but also have desirable properties would become very cheap (perhaps not as cheap as the stuff we use now, but energy and material is cheap enough it doesn’t really matter).
Consider that if there is an early health panic over the effects of microplastics, as in real life, and the norms already militate against plastic to begin with, that further discourages their uptake. Micro-plastics are likely harmless for all practical purposes, but it can be fairly presumed that micro-woody materials are far more wholesome, in as much as they’ve always been present in the atmosphere in small quantity from the dawn of man, and so we’re co-evolved to tolerate them well.
Another angle in my world is if litter is discouraged to the point plastic litter is virtually unheard of, what would be some additional measures that would, or could, be taken to avoid trash and garbage entering the environment? Light packaging that blows in the wind when it slips out of your hand is tough to avoid. Or is it? Would packaging thin and light enough to blow in the wind even be a thing in this world?
It seems odd, but consider in my universe by the 21st century robotics is much more advanced. They have self-propelled luggage, so why could light goods not be contained in something like self-propelled crates? Which could be made almost arbitrarily heavy; they would not blow in the wind. Possibly the advent of drone delivery en masse would encourage heavy crate-like packaging, since it could be standardized and durable without a human being around to supervise it directly. So instead of hauling grocery bags, even paper ones, you have a platoon of cute crates on wheels following you out the door of the store.
This is a world where heavy cellulose-composite boxes, chitin-fiber crates, mycelium-skin jars, glass micro-foam bottles, reusable composite canisters dominate baggage, so there’s far less out there that’s light enough to blow away in the first place. About all that’s left is wrappings for croissants in cafes and such, but even they would be pressed cellulose, mycelium-based paper analogues, dissolving starch films and the like, degrading rapidly after each use once they were released into the environment. Very little would even reach the ocean, and the tiny remainder that did would dissolve long before it sank very far.
End result: a Challenger Deep, and a seabed, that’s more or less pristine, clean, and unsullied by human garbage, because we never were thoughtless enough to make so much of it in the first place. Wouldn’t that have been nice? All because of some minor changes that lead to subtly alien ways of life, and much more utopian results.