Similarly, I strongly believe we should sort our recyclables, even if they end up getting buried in adjacent pits. It's reduced entropy, save that energy for later.
> I believe that waste should be stored until something useful can be done with it --- on a long enough timescale, everything gets recycled eventually.
What happens if we assume the statement is true (as a thought experiment) and explore the ramifications? I see three key follow-up questions?
1. What valuation is implied by the above statement?
2. What do we mean by "waste"?
3. What are the salient differences between _burying_, _storing_, and _burning_?
Some answers to each:
1. It requires the future value, for some unbounded `t`, to exceed the present value. For this to be sensible, the cost of storage cannot dominate.
2. What is waste now is a function of our current economics* and technological level. Storing something indefinitely is an implicit bet that future changes to economics and/or technology will make recovery of item worth it relative to the cumulative storage and opportunity costs (including compounding).
3. In a broad sense, entropy. This applies to both the item stored (its internal state) and the energy required to locate it (i.e. location indexing). Put another way: entropy maps to more concrete concepts such as: cost of recovery, expected degradation, and ability to locate later.
* I don't mean to imply a narrow view of economics. What I actually mean is closer to the considerations from _political economy_.
For a fixed budget, given all of humanity's goals, would storing waste be the rational thing to do? Among other things, it depends on what we classify as waste. Additionally, absolute claims are unhelpful in a world where we need to make relative comparisons.
I would argue that a pile of textiles might be slightly less toxic. But yes, obviously we can’t just dump everything into the ground and ignore the problem.
