I wonder if we will ever get to the space debris situation that is depicted in the movie Space Sweepers.
(3R's was a campaign manufactured by the plastics industry to shift environmental blame onto individuals rather than what industry could've done, such as: waste stream capture, lifecycle management, material minimization, minimum recycled content, and so on.)
LEO stuff is going to deorbit due to drag anyway sooner or later, and we very much would like that to be ”sooner”. Higher orbits are stable for a long time, and intentional deorbiting is not feasible anyway due to the amount of delta-v needed. So there are ”graveyard orbits” into which satellites should be moved before they’re out of propellant.
Anyway, intercepting and capturing defunct satellites on a large scale would be surprisingly costly because of the large variety of orbital planes involved. Inclination changes are expensive with regard to delta-v!
This is Earth orbit, not the ocean or some strip of land.
The debris zooms around the planet on all kinds of trajectories and it's immensely difficult to match velocity and direction in order to capture it.
It's worse than trying to collect machine gun bullets mid-flight that were fired from a rotating carousel by a guy with shaking hands...
Some parts, like spent second rocket stages, present some value because they could be reused as wet-workshops [1]. Material value alone, however, doesn't justify the cost of capture in most cases.
A good idea coming from a bad source doesn't stop it from being a good idea though so I'm not sure why people bring this up so much.
Individuals and companies both have a responsibility to reduce waste.
> Starting in the late 1980s, the plastics industry spent tens of millions of dollars promoting recycling through ads, recycling projects and public relations, telling people plastic could be and should be recycled.
How long have we known about this for now? At what stage does denouncing it become its own form of diversion?
> Industry Spent Millions Selling Recycling — To Sell More Plastic
> For decades, Americans have been sorting their trash believing that most plastic could be recycled. But the truth is, the vast majority of all plastic produced can't be or won't be recycled.
So yeah, the companies are keen on having public opinion thinking “consume without fear, we’ll recycle it”, because it has higher margin than being cleaner themselves. Fighting disinformation is not diinformation.
But who is still loudly saying this disinformation and who is taking it seriously that it's worth bringing up whenever someone mentions that recycling is worthwhile? "Reduce, reuse, recycle" is in priority order too.
The problem at the moment lies not so much in waste collection and end users, but what happens to it afterwards. For example, plastic is considered "recycled" once it's been separated and baled up. But most plastic can't actually be reused. A lot of plastic bales like that are exported - no longer our problem - and becomes invisible. It's often just put in landfills or incinerated after that. Would not be surprised if it's dumped in the ocean directly or via a river either.
I do not believe this is true. The 3R's is widely believed to have come out of the first Earth Day in 1970.
While the oil and plastics companies did put a lot of effort into promoting the idea of plastic recycling, those efforts were later and didn't really start until 1989.