I really love the show, but what do they do with their trash?
Between my girlfriend, and my self we accumulate at least a grocery bags worth of "excess" in a 36 hour period.
Do they just throw it outside? Make it into compost?
Thoughts?
Since oxygen is a somewhat costly resource on Mars, they probably don't decompose it or burn it.
Given that living standards are lower on Mars, I would guess everything is meticulously sorted, cleaned and reused/recycled in some form or another.
Cycle of Life!
All organic matter food waste, paper, human feces, plant matter, etc., would certainly be composted (decomposed) and recycled as nutrients for the plants. Plants would then provide food, oxygen and absorb CO2 exhaled from humans.
Water would also be recycled. the hydroponic greenhouses might also serve as a first stage in the recycling process for H2O.
The green house area of the colony would be many times the area of habitat for humans. There might even be the need for some insects such a bees to provide pollination of the crops. At some point way down the road, you could even have a few trees. apple and pear trees generally are on the small side as far as trees go.
A lot would depend of the availability of water on Mars. Water is key. Water is all. Water is life. Water plus electricity and you can make oxygen. Water can grow food. If you have enough you could have large tanks and grow fish. when you make oxygen from water you also get hydrogen and now you have rocket fuel.
You could even have internal combustion engines like in cars or rovers on mars. The exhaust would be water.
Everything else would be recycled. Metal could be melted down in electric furnaces and recast as useful items.
The colonist as a whole would not produce much trash. Most of what we on Earth throw away is packaging. On Mars the colonist at least for the first few decades at least would live a more communal life. Everyone would be working for the greater good. There would be no monetary system, no money. Food would go straight from the greenhouse to the kitchen in baskets, then to the table to the hungry mouths without ever being packaged.
Everything sent from Earth would have as little packaging as possible. The more weight you have the more it would cost to get off Earth and to Mars. Padding protecting sensitive equipment might be underwear for example. Anything that could be dehydrated would be. A two foot square vacuum sealed shrink-wrapped cube might be hundreds of pairs of socks. a shoe might be stuffed with two or three tee-shirts.
Life would be different........
A grocery bag in 36 hours? We don't get that much out in a week!! Our recycle bin, OTOH, is almost twice as big as our trash bin and it goes out full every other week.
A mission like this would be heavy on the recycling target. Drink your pee and use the nitrates for fertilizer. Dehydrate your poop and recycle the water. The solids can be sifted out into growing media and fertilizee and such. Lots of stuf, probably.
Do you put pee and poop in the trash..?
shareLOL, lars!
Schrodinger's cat walks into a bar and doesn't.
That is actually something that I didn't think about. Like most TV shows, they never mention that people have to go to the bathroom, so it didn't come to mind for me. However, this is supposed to go into great detail about how we'll get to, and live on, Mars, and that is one of the most basic human needs. There are 4 of them living in a workshop for months, but nobody ever talks about bodily functions. Did the workshop have a toilet?
Also, those skin tight suits might look cool, but they don't look like they have any space for some kind of waste disposal. They were in them for almost a day, and while they were going on adrenaline, eventually you're going to have to take a wizz.
It is something that will need to be addressed before we get started going to Mars. Heck, a better way to deal with human waste is something NASA is trying to deal with now. Look up Space Poop Challenge. Yes, that is a real thing.
Pee would be recycled into water.
Poop would be recycled into fertilizer.
Also keep in mind that average temperature on Mars is about -70 Fahrenheit, so any excess matter could simply be frozen by storing it outside.