History Main / LandfillBeyondTheStars

* An episode of ''{{Doraemon}}'' involves how littering is wrong. The gang travel to an Earth-like planet where littering is SeriousBusiness. Gian and Suneo got caught littering and sent work at a disposal site where all garbage is compressed into giant balls and illegally launched into orbit.

* Planet Dirt from ''InvaderZim'', one of [[{{Planetville}} many Irken planets]] dedicated to a [[PlanetOfHats single purpose]].

* ''MegasXLR'' features one in the episode "Junk In The Trunk", which on the surface looks quite similar to Junkion from ''Transformers''. May be coincidence, although given the number of {{Shout Out}}s to Transformers in the series...

* Stage 2 of ''{{Gradius}} Gaiden'', named "Requiem for Revengers". Like the level name suggests, you'll meet the partially-functioning wreckage of [[NostalgiaLevel past Gradius bosses]] trapped in the junk.

* In ''EscapeVelocity'', you can take random missions to dump garbage on uninhabited worlds.

* ''FreighterTales'' is set on an interstellar sewer tank.
* In ''SluggyFreelance'', an alternate universe that's a mash-up of ''Franchise/StarTrek'', ''StarWars'', and ''Franchise/{{Alien}}'' regularly sends ships to a dimensional portal in deep space, where they dump toxic waste into whatever dimension happens to be on the other side.

[[folder:Film]]

* The Planet of Junk in ''The {{Franchise/Transformers}}: TheMovie'' is partly an example. While entirely comprised of junk, it is not a sphere so much as part of a crescent, implying that it is an artificial world. Whether the Planet of Junk was built by the Junkions is never actually explained.

* In ''WesternAnimation/WallE'', Earth itself has become a junk planet, and humanity has gone beyond the stars instead. Not a usual example of the trope, as Earth was not intentionally made such, but the visual aesthetic is the same.

In SpeculativeFiction, one will sometimes find that entire planets get used as interstellar landfills. Implicitly this means that it is [[CasualInterstellarTravel somehow worthwhile to launch refuse into space and take it to another planet, possibly one that is located in another solar system]], in order to dump it there, rather than [[HurlItIntoTheSun give it a push towards the nearest star]], dump it on a nearby worthless, uninhabitable rock, or just recycle the stuff (not to mention massive and cheap energy sources that make such launches worthwhile in the first place-- just getting into space in the first place is [[GravitySucks a lot harder than most people think]]). This is usually a consequence of the fact that SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale, treating interstellar space and the different planets like [[SpaceIsAnOcean a sea with islands in it]] rather than as an infinite void with tiny rocks and not-so-tiny furnaces separated from each other by immense distances, an environment where any man-made object would be so tiny as to be insignificant for most purposes.

* In issue #12 of the Marvel comic of ''Franchise/BattlestarGalactica'', Starbuck, Boomer, and Athena, on recon patrol, stumble across Scavenge World, a planet composed entirely of spare parts and inhabited by alien scavengers. They are captured and brought before the throne of Eurayle, the leader of the scavenger "family." Meanwhile, the Galactica is buffeted by a unexpected Cylon attack. The Cylons are momentarily averted, and the Fleet arrives at Scavenge World. Learning of the Galactica's situation, Eurayle makes a proposal - she will use her powers of the mind to free Commander Adama from the Memory Machine, if she can receive Lieutenant Starbuck in return. Starbuck eventually agrees to her offer. After the Cylons are defeated, Starbuck stays behind with her while the Colonial fleet moves on.
Starbuck escapes from Scavenge World and returns to the fleet in issue #19. Eurayle pursues the fleet in issue #20, and Starbuck and Apollo meet with her. Starbuck agrees to fight her in a duel to the death. Eurayle wins, but after she leaves it is revealed that Starbuck faked his own death.
The Scavenge World ship that Starbuck used to escape winds up giving the Colonials the coordinates to Earth, and the series ends with the fleet making a hyperjump to their final destination.

* In issue #12,of the Marvel Comic of Battlestar Galactica, Starbuck, Boomer, and Athena, on recon patrol, stumble across Scavenge World, a planet composed entirely of spare parts and inhabited by alien scavengers. They are captured and brought before the throne of Eurayle, the leader of the scavenger "family." Meanwhile, the Galactica is buffeted by a unexpected Cylon attack. The Cylons are momentarily averted, and the Fleet arrives at Scavenge World. Learning of the Galactica's situation, Eurayle makes a proposal - she will use her powers of the mind to free Commander Adama from the Memory Machine, if she can receive Lieutenant Starbuck in return. Starbuck eventually agrees to her offer. After the Cylons are defeated, Starbuck stays behind with her while the Colonial fleet moves on.
Starbuck escapes from Scavenge World and returns to the fleet in issue #19. Eurayle pursues the fleet in issue #20, and Starbuck and Apollo meet with her. Starbuck agrees to fight her in a duel to the death. Eurayle wins, but after she leaves it is revealed that Starbuck faked his own death.
The Scavenge World ship that Starbuck used to escape winds up giving the Colonials the coordinates to Earth, and the series ends with the fleet making a hyperjump to their final destination.

* In ''WesternAnimation/{{WALL-E}}'', Earth itself has become a junk planet, and humanity has gone beyond the stars instead. Not a usual example of the trope, as Earth was not intentionally made such, but the visual aesthetic is the same.

In SpeculativeFiction, you will sometimes find that entire planets get used as interstellar landfills. Implicitly this means that it is [[CasualInterstellarTravel somehow worthwhile to launch refuse into space and take it to another planet, possibly one that is located in another solar system]], in order to dump it there, rather than [[HurlItIntoTheSun give it a push towards the nearest star]], dump it on a nearby worthless, uninhabitable rock, or just recycle the stuff (not to mention massive and cheap energy sources that make such launches worthwhile in the first place-- just getting into space in the first place is [[GravitySucks a lot harder than most people think]]). This is usually a consequence of the fact that SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale, treating interstellar space and the different planets like [[SpaceIsAnOcean a sea with islands in it]] rather than as an infinite void with tiny rocks and not-so-tiny furnaces separated from each other by immense distances, an environment where any man-made object would be so tiny as to be insignificant for most purposes.

** One episode has the crew of ''Planet Express'' sent to destroy a ball of garbage that was previously thrown into orbit, ''{{Armageddon}}''-style. The bomb, however, "misfires", and the Earth resorts to a different tactic: rolling up an identically-sized garbage ball and tossing it at the big ball of trash.

* In ''{{Yu-Gi-Oh Zexal}}'', Astral World is being destroyed... by humans intentionally dumping their garbage in it.

* In issue #12, Starbuck, Boomer, and Athena, on recon patrol, stumble across Scavenge World, a planet composed entirely of spare parts and inhabited by alien scavengers. They are captured and brought before the throne of Eurayle, the leader of the scavenger "family." Meanwhile, the Galactica is buffeted by a unexpected Cylon attack. The Cylons are momentarily averted, and the Fleet arrives at Scavenge World. Learning of the Galactica's situation, Eurayle makes a proposal - she will use her powers of the mind to free Commander Adama from the Memory Machine, if she can receive Lieutenant Starbuck in return. Starbuck eventually agrees to her offer. After the Cylons are defeated, Starbuck stays behind with her while the Colonial fleet moves on.

* ''VideoGame/StarFox64'' has the planet Zoness. Formerly a popular vacation spot of the Lylat System, Andross turned the place into his own personal wastebasket, which noticeably horrifies your team-members. It also appeared as though the copious amounts of toxic waste also mutated the native life on the planet. By ''VideoGame/StarFoxAssault'', if Zoness being a multiplayer map is any indication, it seems that a cleanup effort, first hinted in the Corneria stage, was successful.

** The Soviets had plans to use their Energiya rocket to launch nuclear waste into space (into a safe planned solar orbit, that is) but the plan came to nothing thanks to the fall of the USSR.

[caption-width-right:350:But where do they dump the planet when it's full?]]

* Having excessive amounts of space junk floating around is becoming a real concern for engineers. Generally, space garbage can either be burnt up in the atmosphere or tossed up into a graveyard orbit, which is beyond a geosynchronous orbit. This isn't a perfect solution, but requires less fuel in some cases, like for satellites in geosynchronous orbits. And that's where the [[{{Anime/Planetes}} space garbagemen come in]]...

For this trope to work at all, the setting must have ''very'' [[CasualInterstellarTravel Casual (and VERY CHEAP) Interstellar Travel.]] There are, however, ways to harden this trope: make the planet in question a useless dwarf planet in a nearby asteroid belt, Ceres-like (delta-v to reach such a planet could be really low), used only to dump garbage of space origin from the same system, and equipped with dirty recycling industries that make it more efficient to fling refuse there, rather than into the star. For this trope in a smaller scale, see DownInTheDumps.

* LarryNiven's short stoy "[[Literature/KnownSpace The Woman in Del Rey Crater]]" involves humanity dumping most of their nuclear waste into a single crater on the Moon. This is actually explained pretty well: the radioactive waste is hideously dangerous NOW, but we may find a way to use it at some later time. The Moon has no environment to damage, is very sparsely populated, and is relatively easy for this near-future society to reach, so it makes an excellent landfill until recycling technology catches up.

* In a different version of this trope, the Malon in ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'' dump their dangerously radioactive "antimatter waste" (no, we don't know how that works either) in other regions of space whether or not they're inhabited. They do give a brief HandWave about why they can't just HurlItIntoTheSun, though; doing so often enough would apparently cause a star to ''explode''. Quite why they persist in using a power generation techinque that produces so much appallingly hazardous waste as a byproduct is not explained, however.

* {{StarFox64}} has the planet Zoness. Formerly a popular vacation spot of the Lylat System, Andross turned the place into his own personal wastebasket, which noticibly horrifies your team-members. It also appeared as though the copious amounts of toxic waste also mutated the native life on the planet. By {{StarFoxAssault}}, if Zoness being a multiplayer map is any indication, it seems that a cleanup effort, first hinted in the Corneria stage, was successful.

* In the film ''{{Soldier}}'' the main character had been dumped on a "landfill planet" because he was taken for dead.

For this trope to work at all, the setting must have ''very'' [[CasualInterstellarTravel Casual (and VERY CHEAP) Interstellar Travel.]] For this trope in a smaller scale, see DownInTheDumps.

* LarryNiven's short stoy "The Woman in Del Rey Crater" involves humanity dumping most of their nuclear waste into a single crater on the Moon. This is actually explained pretty well: the radioactive waste is hideously dangerous NOW, but we may find a way to use it at some later time. The Moon has no environment to damage, is very sparsely populated, and is relatively easy for this near-future society to reach, so it makes an excellent landfill until recycling technology catches up.

* In a different version of this trope, the Malon in ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'' dump their theta radiation in other regions of space whether or not they're inhabited.

* A more reasonable version appears in ''MassEffect''; the planet Korlus is used as a junkyard/recycling plant for old space-craft, and only those that were near a [[PortalNetwork Mass Relay]]. It's a dirty and dangerous task due to the various volatile chemicals released during the process. So it is less of a planetary junkyard, and more like a planet who's primary industry is ship-breaking.