United States Antarctic Program Field Manual (2024) [pdf]

I find it neat that even in a climate as hostile as the Antarctic humans still make an effort to recycle.

> Field Camp Hut Etiquette

> Sort and pack all trash and recycled materials and take them back to McMurdo Station for proper disposal.

Oh man if you had any idea how much work goes into waste sorting & disposal there. In McMurdo every trash station has trash cans for ~10 different categories. I was always calling up the waste department to ask about classification. We would get bored and argue about the classification of juice boxes for "fun". I worked on Erebus and all of our pee & poop got helicoptered out in buckets. Food waste was shipped all the way back to CA and had to be kept frozen the whole way.

I bet that helicopter pilot was some ex-Navy F-14 pilot who liked to buzz the tower and risked his taxpayer-owned jet to save his wingman after an encounter with MiG 28s.

I remember going to a talk on Antarctica where someone said that other nationalities would go and salvage stuff from the trash heap outside the US base at McMurdo. This was some years ago. I assume things have improved since then?