This may shock you to read, but as a young enlisted man, I did not consistently make excellent life choices in my early 20s.

At one point I found myself working as the night shift supervisor for the division on an aircraft carrier that handled waste disposal. I'm glad to say it was every bit as glamorous as it sounds. Fortunately, the Kinder Gentler Navy of the '00s had learned to protect the environment, and while we'd eagerly kick 55 gallon oil drums off the side (remember, if <2% of the original contents remain, it's legally "empty!" Poke it with a fire axe and kick it off the elevator!), good ol' Uncle Sam was going to be sure the plastic was properly recycled!*

*("Fun" fact, most of the plastic waste you "recycle" nowadays ends up in the same place that ours did; the landfill. Plastics, aside from carefully cleaned and sorted numbers 1-3, aren't super recyclable, and it's often cheaper (and sometimes more environmentally friendly, FFS) to make new plastic from crude oil, than to jump through the organic chemistry hoops needed to turn Styrofoam back into something useful.)

The Navy melted (melts? FFS, I hope they've changed!) big bags of plastic trash down into giant plastic pucks, about 2.5 feet across. The machines that did it sucked; they were unreliable as all hell. It was a 1 or 2 foot wide cylinder with a locking lid, and a hydraulic ram on the bottom; you drop in a bag of plastic, lock the lid, and the lid, walls, and floor of the cylinder heat up to a couple hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Then the ram slowly comes up, over 30 minutes, and squishes the trash bag into a big inch or two thick puck of plastic. Problem was, the ship only had just enough machines to keep up, and half would break within the first month underway; then, Trash Mountain would begin to form.

Another problem? Sure, the ship had "Clean Plastic" trash cans. Rule was, only rinsed out, clean plastic was allowed, inside of clear plastic bags. No residue, no food waste, just clean virgin plastic.

Well, that was day shift's job to screen the waste. And sure, they processed some.

So, Trash Mountain would grow every morning, in both the Forward and Aft Plastic Waste Processing (PWP) rooms. Aft kept up* (sidebar on this later; "lazy" Marines are awesome), but up Forward, the Mountain grew.

Remember that day shift "screened" the waste? All the plastic trash was in clear plastic bags. They'd hold it in the air and spin it, and if they didn't see anything, they wouldn't bother asking questions.

My question is, WTF do they think was in a wide mouthed Gatorade bottle covered in duct tape?

Usually, it was piss. Sometimes, another bag full of shit would be buried in the middle of the bag (presumably, someone couldn't get a watch relief). These things do not smell of roses when heated to 200°F and squished.

So, coming home from my second cruise, us on nights get the job of cleaning out the Forward PWP, and prepping it all to offload at our last port (Jebel Ali, I think) before heading straight home (the rest of the plastic got held in the hangar bay in trash boxes until home). We had to box up Trash Mountain (folks hadn't been doing the "First In, First Out" thing, so the heart of the mountain was ancient), and then clean the place. I wouldn't ask anyone else to do something I wouldn't do. Also, I didn't smoke at the start of this shit. At some point, though, I noticed the only people who hadn't vomited in the middle of carrying out 3 and 4 month old plastic bags of rotten food, piss, and shit, were the smokers. So, when we took an oxygen break, I went with them to the smoke pit, and bummed a Newport off of ol' Jake (not to be confused with young Jake). And with my sense of smell dulled by shitty tobacco and menthol, we finished up the night.

In the immediate aftermath, we cleaned the fuck out of that room. No shit, I would have willingly eaten off that floor after. The cleaning probably did more respiratory damage than the smoking. Also, with so many of our waste management duties suspended on the cruise home (fuck sorting, it all goes in the landfill! per the HMFICs), Forward PWP turned into the cards/nap/LAN party room. In the time I had left before EAOS, I became aware of the smoke pit culture (u/FluffyClamShell does a good job of describing it here https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryStories/comments/ya7q07/popping_smoke/), which actually helped me stay on top of shit for the remainder of my time in.

I quit cold turkey about a month before EAOS, as my wife-to-be would have ripped me a new asshole otherwise (God bless her, she's given me 2 great kids, and puts up with my dumb ass).

*So, On "Lazy" Marines... As glamorous as the temporary duty was, the Navy did not opt to send its high achievers to it. The Marines, on the other hand (we had a Marine air wing embarked, with Marine F/A-18s) recognized that the amount of effort required for night shift guys in HAZMAT could be pretty low (compared to working in their air wing), and would cycle guys through so they could relax for a bit. Navy day shift khaki (E-7+) wanted the Marines on nights, because they were "Lazy." I(E-5)'d see those 2 guys (E-4 and E-3) at muster at the start and end of shift, and never had any fucking idea where they were in the in-between (just once, I needed to find them; I asked another random Marine, and they showed up 10 minutes later). However, the Aft PWP that they ran positively sparkled, and with half the machines, they processed twice the waste the forward guys did. No idea how they did it. I wasn't gonna ask, either. I assume they were magical in some way. I never once saw a reason to run them down when I toured that space, even at 3:00 AM.