April 1: The Advocate has learned that, in an unprecedented federal, state and local partnership, the town of Amherst has been given the go-ahead to send its solid waste into orbit. On April 2, Amherst's coffee grounds, battered sneakers and greasy pizza boxes will join 17,000 other objects, including wrenches, cameras and spent rockets, that are now circling the globe.
It's a bit of a jolt to realize that if you leave for Sydney, Australia April 2, a smelly heap of torn and faded Minutemen sweatshirts will arrive before you, since garbage in space travels at 17,500 miles an hour, about 30 times the speed of your transpacific flight. But the garbage-in-space plan will save an estimated .500698316 acres of landfill space per year.
The small college town won a permit to orbit its rubbish by achieving a 117 percent recycling rate over the last five years. "Amherst exceeded expectations," said Department of Environmental Protection spokesman P. P. Mushmouth, who poohpooed as jealousy claims by other communities that had been contenders for the garbage-in-space pilot program that 117 percent recycling rates were a mathematical impossibility.
"Amherstites, widely known for their PC environmental compulsions, scour other towns for recyclables," was Mushmouth's explanation. "Amherst won the permit by minimizing its waste, and it won it fair and square."
"The rubbish that comes out of Amherst has always been over our heads anyway," said a Hadley public works staffer who asked to remain anonymous.
NASA spokesman Milk E. Waye, reached by telephone in Houston, confirmed that the hometown of poet Emily Dickinson would be a pioneer in the environmentally friendly relegation of trash to low-earth orbit and said studies were under way to maximize interplanetary disposal space.
"We might be able to get the stuff into a wormhole somewhere, " said Waye. Reportedly, UMass physicists suggest that extreme acceleration of the material might propel it around a curve in time that would eliminate it for 500 years, paving the way for a similar solution to the problem of nuclear waste.
