KESTS to GEO's low cost, high capacity continuous lift from ground to GEO and back, could enable a major solution to the accumulating toxic materials our industrial way of life creates, materials nature cannot recycle and in some cases is severely poisoning the environment; and materials (such as computer circuit board components) which otherwise becomes unavailable for further economical use by industry.

This would be done by building solar powered total recycling plants in GEO, which use concentrated solar energy to convert incoming trash into a plasma, then the plasma is accelerated to a constant direction and speed, exiting across a magnetic field which deflects its components to locations dependent on the mass/charge ratio of the component elements, to be gathered in deflection-angle defined located collection containers as pure materials for use in building things anew. This is a principle used in early simple forms of Mass Spectrometers. The entropy would thus be reversed by this process, consuming solar energy while doing so, enabling materials to be returned for constructive uses anew, instead of remaining in the ecosystem to toxify the earth's future.

Most people probably do not care to think much about trash and discards, believing the garbage can and the flush eliminates the problem. Yet, it all stays in the universe; and that which Nature cannot recycle, stays to foul our nest. Landfills only temporarily solve the problem, really only are storage sites for the bulky less toxic discards of homes and industrial processes.

Total recycling of civilization's waste

-- either by the Earth's hydrocarbon natural recycling mechanisms, or by technologically derived total recycling mechanisms. Much of our toxic waste products which stymie us now, can be totally recycled using abundant solar power and hard vacuum chemical element separation plants in orbit, in this proposed scenario. Understanding the purpose, technological principles, socioeconomic considerations, potential futures enabled depending on how it is implemented, and overall costs/benefits/costs are presented here.

The planetary biosystem has functioned as a vast recycling machine for hundreds of millions of years, yet this recycling machine is unable to cope with much of the kinds of refuse material spewed out by mankind's increasingly sophisticated civilization. The ancient earth recycling system has depended on an extremely diverse biosystem, from the global scale to the local scale, yet the spread of civilization overruns these bio system’s territories and exterminates species comprising the biodiversity, further hindering the ability of the planet to recycle civilizations heaps of waste material of foreign nature to the ecosystem, sometimes quite toxic to it. The vision here is integrated with the purpose of restoring the biodiversity of Earth's natural recycling system, while integrating the unique qualities of the space nearby the earth to provide room for expansion, vast solar derived energy, solar powered immense hard vacuum total recycling plants in orbit, and overall total recycling of civilization as it takes up increasing residence in orbit around the earth. and major raw materials not too distant energy-wise from there.

With the immense transportation capacity of KESTS to GEO in place, and used for emplacing adequate numbers of solar power satellites, probably the next most important task is to emplace solar powered chemical separation plants there in GEO, and begin the transport of the more hazardous wastes already accumulated on Earth, up there for total reduction into its component elemental chemicals. One way would be to use solar focused energy to heat an ejected stream of waste materials into a plasma of ionized elements, then utilize electromagnetic fields to separate them out spatially as a function of their mass-charge ratio, collecting the thusly purified chemical elements in spatially distributed bins, to be collected when full and returned to earth along the KESTS, for use as high quality raw materials for new manufacturing purposes, thus providing the total recycling function.

So this vision is developed here to provide knowledge and understanding of its intended purposes, technical functional principles, and intrinsic nature; plans for exploring and implementing the project in the socioeconomic systems existing in the world; some of the ranges of R&D to be explored, the action which can be taken in the present time and near future so as to implement it quickly enough to have the necessary continuing viable energy bioresources and gusto needed for success; construction methods and materials to be evaluated for the applications and operating environments, the overall encompassing project anchored in the distant future’s optimum usage; the merging into the existing earth ecosystem and thereby harmonious expansion of the earth surface ecosystem into nearby high earth orbit, and the establishment of the project as a living entity in itself.

Copyright © 2005 James E. D. Cline