Trash and recycling

[Unicron]

I've been sorting some of my giant nerd library recently and reading over some of the books I have for gaming, tech manuals and the like. I'm curious to think about how trash disposal and recycling can work, as it naturally depends on plot. TNG and later series would seem to infer that having replicators lets you recycle stuff efficiently, but it also seems like there's a lot of plot potential for stuff that might be valuable on the interstellar market. And certainly there's always a use for fleets or characters using older, seemingly obsolete technology because they either don't have better options or don't want to part with certain vintage.

Some of the non-Trek series I'm familiar with have had a bit of fun with the concept. Hoo-Lan's species in the My Teacher is an Alien series engineered a sort of pet creature whose main function was to devour garbage, and could consume a wide range of things.

The Vesk in Starfinder (who are reptilians like the Gorn but with a warrior culture more like Klingons) built one class of ship, the Wayfarer, with an interesting design flaw in the earlier models. The Wayfarer was intended to be a bridge between the more heavily armed military vessels that make up much of the Vesk fleet, and the civilian vessels that would perform non-military roles like trade. Due to rushed production, the trash disposal system was unwittingly weaponized (of sorts) on older Wayfarers because of how it would eject cubes of trash into space with excessive force, and the company later used this for marketing purposes as a special feature. Some crews actually find the option attractive, if only for the purpose of humiliating an enemy.

 

[NCC-73515]

The Malon come to mind

 

[Sgt_G]

I drafted a full set of deck plans for the Police Cutter from the game Star Fleet Battles. When I took them down to Amarillo and spread them out on the table for Steve Cole to look over, he started laughing, "There's even a trash compactor that's big enough to put a person in!"

 

[Vagabond Elf]

I personally don't see Star Fleet in either TOS or TNG providing much on a "surplus" market.

In TOS, the vide is very much Golden Age of Exploration and Sail. Ships are implied to be rare - "only 12 like her in the Fleet" - and Star Fleet and the Federation are stretched out over a large area compared to their resources. This suggests that by the time Star Fleet let anything go, it really isn't safe or usable. To be sure, that's a headcanon informed by the way the Royal Navy wouldn't throw anything away or decommission a ship until she sank at her moorings - even after a frigate or liner wasn't usable as a warship, she'd be used as a transport for as long as possible and then as a floating naval base.

In TNG, as noted replicators make recycling easy. I don't know if I'd say "efficient," as the energy costs must be huge, but definitely effective, and TNG-era Star Fleet has massive amounts of inexpensive energy and a cultural idealism that would object to creating landfills. As for surplus - well, if you're "in" with the Federation, they'll just give you as much technology as you can handle. Abundant cheap energy means replicators can turn any mass into any other mass easily and affordably, so construction costs in time and materials and energy are vastly reduced. Not zeroed, clearly, but if a new member world needs half a dozen survey ships, it probably isn't a big deal to just build new. (We know that certain ship designs last for a very long time, but we have minimal data about how long the ships themselves stay in service.) And if you're not "in" with the Federation, the Prime Directive says you can't have their stuff anyway. More advanced nations like Klingons or Ferengi could trade, of course, but it makes more sense to trade for uncommon elements or knowledge than finished tech, and despite their idealism the Federation isn't going to hand the Ferengi a modern starship to reverse engineer.

As for trash disposal - I think it's clear I feel that by TNG it's all broken down via replicators. In TOS it probably isn't. As I recall both FASA and FJD's deckplans had large spaces devoted to recycling, though, so a more manual process probably recovers a lot of material, and what's not recoverable gets ejected into a star.