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Comment by darknavi | Hacker News Reader

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darknavi·

I find it neat that even in a climate as hostile as the Antarctic humans still make an effort to recycle.

> Field Camp Hut Etiquette

> Sort and pack all trash and recycled materials and take them back to McMurdo Station for proper disposal.

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Oh man if you had any idea how much work goes into waste sorting & disposal there. In McMurdo every trash station has trash cans for ~10 different categories. I was always calling up the waste department to ask about classification. We would get bored and argue about the classification of juice boxes for "fun". I worked on Erebus and all of our pee & poop got helicoptered out in buckets. Food waste was shipped all the way back to CA and had to be kept frozen the whole way.

I bet that helicopter pilot was some ex-Navy F-14 pilot who liked to buzz the tower and risked his taxpayer-owned jet to save his wingman after an encounter with MiG 28s.

I remember going to a talk on Antarctica where someone said that other nationalities would go and salvage stuff from the trash heap outside the US base at McMurdo. This was some years ago. I assume things have improved since then?

I have no idea, never been there. I was referencing Maverick from Top Gun being threatened with flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog shit.

Sorry, posted to the wrong child thread.

Juice boxes are cardboard, plastic and alumunium glued together and a hassle to recylce. But heck, their inventors (Tetrapak) are billionaires!

Very fun insight, thanks for sharing your story!

I assume things like Starlink have made the station a lot less "boring", which might depreciate some of the "off-grid" novelty of being there.

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