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wall e - How can the people in the Axiom survive for 700 years?


In WALL•E, it's established that the 5-year spaceship has been keeping people alive for 700 years. Also, it's clear that (at least before they all left the Earth), the garbage problem was never solved. We even see the Axiom itself keeps throwing garbage to outer space with the help of the WALL•As.


So, if they keep constantly throwing and throwing garbage, how can they keep living? What's all their food made of?



Answer



The short answer is that the ship is quite literally cannibalising itself, along with the passengers.



We know from the "All Aboard the Axiom" special feature that the ship's population was originally around 600,000 however by the time of the Wall•E film, there appears to be dramatically fewer passengers on board the ship.


This is confirmed in a couple of graphics from the "History of BNL" featurette (from the Wall-E bluray) which show the before/after populations (in binary), starting at around 700,000 but declining to less than 10,000 in the second panel



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This is also backed up by the 'Get to know the bots' featurette which refers to the ship's "thousands of passengers" (e.g. rather than "hundreds of thousands") and the image of the lido deck where all of the (approximately 8-10000) passengers have gathered when the alarm sounds.


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As to what they're eating, the film's script mentions that one of the Captain's duties is to maintain the "regenerative food buffet". It seems likely that in the absence of the fresh food, Auto has tasked the ship with liquefying the dead and feeding them to each successive generation. This would also explain the fall in population since the nutritive value would decline each time a corpse is recycled.


The same applies to the machinery used to maintain the ship. With a heavily declining population, robots that are now surplus to requirement can be disassembled and dumped overboard. Note that all of the "non-recyclables" seen in the disposal bay are pieces of metal or pieces of broken robots rather than any organic or plastic waste


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