Editor:
I laud your imaginative, tongue-in-cheek, approach to garbage disposal in the June 23, 2022 Peace Arch News opinion piece, about firing the earth’s garbage into the sky and having the sun incinerate it. You opined that “Stuff that would break down here on earth would be instantly vaporized. And that vapour? Evaporated.”
A business assessment technique I learned too late in life is SWOT: Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. You described a great job of the idea’s Strength of eliminating the world’s garbage pollution problem; the Weakness of its incredible costs, and the Opportunity for creating greatly increased employment, needed to bring the idea to fruition.
Although you did add the supplement, “I don’t mean to hit you with so much science all at once, but even biological, chemical, and nuclear waste would be no match for Old Sol,” you didn’t really address Threats. What happens to waste after incineration by Old Sol?
Incinerated waste does not just disappear in a puff of smoke. In 1842, Julius Robert Mayer discovered the First Law of Thermodynamics which states,
“Energy is neither created nor destroyed”; it merely changes its form.
Incineration converts trash like paper, plastics, metals, and food scraps into more toxic ash, combustion and acid gases, carcinogen dioxin, particulates, heavy metals, and nitrogen oxide, all of which are poisonous to the environment.
“Your solution has merely moved the Earth’s climate warming pollution from where it only affects the Earth’s atmosphere to out past the ozone layer into where the sun lives, the troposphere, aka the Heavens, Heaven, the Heavenly Sphere.
However, it would possibly affect all those really, really, good people who passed on before us.
Do we really want to upset God more than we do now?”
Harold Bergmann, White Rock