Comment by foobarbecue | Hacker News Reader

Comment by foobarbecue | Hacker News Reader

You guys should see the trash sorting at McMurdo station, Antarctica. When I first traveled there in 2009, there were about 20 categories, and dorms had an area just like this one with about 10 of those categories present, each with a page of documentation. If your category wasn't there, you needed to go find that category somewhere else. The categories overlapped and changed from year to year and had names like "paper towels" (compressible non-recyclables that could be baled on station) and "burnables" (I still don't really know what that was for, since incineration is banned out there). Users were encouraged to call the Waste Department for support, and actually the people at Waste seemed to understand and believe in the system (unlike me) so I called them frequently to ask where to put e.g. an empty juice box. To be fair, this system was borne out of the real difficulties of waste management in Antarctica, and I'm not sure I could have done a better job with the UX. (Constraints were that everything went back to the US on a boat, food waste had to be shipped back refrigerated, etc.)

Fascinating. Thanks for sharing, I thin this is probably one extreme of the scale of effort taking care of garbage... and with good reason given the delicate ecosystem.

The things you learn talking about design ;-)

Indeed, managing waste for a station of over 1000 people while complying with a restrictive international treaty and putting up with extreme environmental conditions is a really tricky and dangerous job. I knew some of the "wasties" well and had lots of respect for them. They had to deal with conundrums like: how do you forklift pallets of waste which are frozen to the ground by several inches of ice following flooding?

Why exactly was incineration not allowed? I can understand it being logistically difficult to implement, but it would sure be a lot simpler, and it's not like there's enough people down there that the carbon footprint relative to the airshed would be significant.

Well you inspired me to actually look this up for the first time. Turns out it's allowed, per Article 3 here: http://www.ats.aq/documents/recatt/Att010_e.pdf but McMurdo stopped doing it in 1993 because it was more expensive than shipping unburnt waste north. ( http://www.southpolestation.com/trivia/igy2/incinerator.html ) So the category may well have been sort of vestigial.

Fire is extremely dangerous in Antarctica, even though it sounds counterintuitive.

Firstly, it's hard to put out. Even though there's lots of frozen water, liquid water that you can throw onto a fire to put it out is lacking.

Secondly, if a small structure catches fire, it's not like in the middle of a US city where you can just stay at a hotel and buy what you lost. Depending on the time of the year, the tools inside might take months to replace, not to mention the shelter itself being lost.

urgh, s/bourne/born

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