​We should dump all of humanity’s waste into giant holes in the earth’s crust

Something recently got me thinking about our waste problems as a species. I mean, trash and all. It’s a worldwide conundrum. We reuse or recycle what we can, and try to bury the rest, and shit still makes it all out into the oceans and stuff. Trying to manage it all takes up a tremendous amount of resources.

And think about it. All that trash buried in the landfills, it’s just gonna ride along under neat little man-made slivers of the earth’s surface for eons, until whatever doesn’t break down will eventually, inevitably, get swallowed up by the earth when our tectonic plates subside, essentially recycling it all into the core, right along with the entirety of the ancient civilization we will have become.

So why not simply accelerate that process? Dig a big hole straight down to the bottom of the earth’s crust, right down into the mantle. Yeah, I know, that’s a deep hole, but you’ll know you’ve hit the mantle when your drill bit comes up melted. Then send down a tunnel boring machine. You’ll know you’re there when your TBM disappears. I know it’s sacrificial, but it’ll be worth it. Then drive a huge tube into the hole – like with ramps that fall off into the inside where you can just shove things over the edge and into the hole.

Sure, the bottom of the tube will melt, but who cares? So will everything else! It’ll find a natural boundary all by itself and we can just keep dumping trash down there. Anything and everything, really – trash, plastics, organics, rusted out cars, nuclear waste, concrete and rebar, whatever it is, just drop it down there. The earth’s mantle will make short work of it all, melting everything down to its constituent elements and redistributing them throughout the earth’s core.

I mean, on an elemental scale, everything we have came from the earth, right? So let mother earth’s great digestive tract recycle it. I don’t see why this wouldn’t be the perfect solution.