In Salaise-sur-Sanne, southern France, the Tredi factory is packed with high tech purification systems that handle extreme toxic cleanups like the one in 2006 in Ivory Coast that involved 6,000 tons of toxic waste and killed 10 people. Where does all your waste plastic from bottles and wrappers and tupperware go? To this factory in Qingzhou City, Shandong Province, China. Tons of plastic gets melted down and converted into threads and grain-shaped pieces. The results are sold to factories as raw materials. People help feed the garbage machines, too. Plastic straws are laid out in vast bales and piles to dry in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Once dried, they'll be shipped to a plastic recycling factory. Bangladesh has a near 100 percent recycling rate for its waste, and has one of the most efficient plastic recycling systems in the world. Dealing with waste can be very low-tech and industrial. In Ghana, workers turn waste into fuel for the local palm oil plant. Here you can see them scooping it into a steam-driven machine that powers the factory. The lowest-tech waste disposal job falls to these Palestinian workers, who use sledgehammers to break up the remains of a bombed factory. The cement and metals will be recycled. Images via Getty.

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• In Lexx, the living spaceship was also equipped with... living toilets. They even had large, waggling tongues, a la Little Shop of Horrors, and were more than eager to lap up the crew's waste materials. That would either make going to the bathroom incredibly fun, or moderately terrifying. Think you can hold it for 42,000,000 miles? You could if the toilet looked like it wanted to eat your ass.
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• Lexx wasn't the only living spaceship with bathroom facilities. Moya in Farscape also grew convenience spots for her crew, including showers and toilets. In fact, the water system was provided by Moya's own internal plumbing system, which her saliva powered the sewer system. That just seems like all kinds of "two girls, one cup" wrong.
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• In the future of Demolition Man, Sylvester Stallone was perplexed by the futuristic toilets. The bowls looked the same, but as far as waste management went, there were three mysterious "seashells" next to the toilet that he never quite figured out. We never figured it out either, and we'll chalk it up to extremely lazy writers who didn't feel the need to explain how they wiped their asses in the future, so now we'll forever be wondering what those damn shells did.
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• Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was so detailed that the Zero Gravity Toilet installed on the passenger ship to the moon including verbose instructions on how to use the waste facilities. Although if you really had to go, we can't imagine anyone taking the time to actually read through all of these steps before stepping inside. Wouldn't you print something like this where you could easily read it while doing your duty? The only way this could be worse would be if they just handed you a 200 page manual as you went in.
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• Onboard the Serenity in Firefly, living space is at a premium, so they've got toilets that fold neatly into the wall and flush as they go. Then you pull out the sink like a drawer and wash your hands, although preferably using soap. In the clip below, Captain Mal Reynolds takes a whiz and then simply WETS HIS HANDS DOWN THE WATER then puts them on his face. Meaning he's just coated his cheeks in penis germs. No wonder he hasn't scored with Inara just yet.
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With apologies to Kathleen Meyer's How To Shit In The Woods.