The folks over at FOXNews.com posted an interesting article the other day talking about space junk – the stuff that orbits our planet that has no use or is literally garbage. If you click on the link above to that article you’ll see an artist’s rendition of how much stuff is floating around in the atmosphere.

This article coincides with a special report that I just finished reading from The Economist talking about garbage and how to cleanup the garbage on the planet. The main lesson to learn from all of this is that everyone needs to be more aware of what they are throwing out and, to a greater degree, where their garbage is going. In other words, if you choose to throw a can, plastic bag, or piece of cardboard in the garbage as opposed to recycling it, that singular act alone is not enough to put us in a bad situation. One person, one can – we have enough room for that in our landfills. But what happens when all 25,000 people in your town do the same thing…or all 5 million people in your state? What if all 300 million people in America toss out one can per week? What about two cans? How many sodas or beers or other canned/bottled beverages do you have in a week?

The picture becomes a little bit clearer, I hope.

However, it is amazing that we are creating such a vast amount of “space junk” in the higher and lower atmospheres. And this isn’t stuff just floating around out there; this is stuff that is going at a few thousand miles per hour! Imagine being on a spaceship and all of the bravery that shooting up into the atmosphere takes, but then getting up there and having a stray nut or bolt (or an entire dead satellite) smash into your spaceship at two thousand miles per hour. Unreal.

This is an issue that someone really needs to get on top of – space needs to be cleaned up.