From: Leroy Glover
To: Captain McCrea
Re: Operation Cleanup Results

Captain–

I hope this message finds you well. I want to thank you again for the opportunity to look into our past and see what has gotten us to this point in our history. The stories of the time before the Axiom continue to fascinate me, and I hope this will be the beginning of several messages on that subject. I would like to begin with one of the more difficult stories: the fate of Operation Cleanup and how it relates to the WALL-E series of robots.

I will detail the story of Buy N Large in a future message. For the purposes of this story, it is sufficient to say that when Operation Cleanup began, BnL was the sole governing and commercial body on Earth, handling all aspects of people's lives much as they were handled aboard the Axiom although not to the same extent. Under BnL's leadership, waste levels on Earth reached catastrophic amounts, prompting the BnL board of directors (led by CEO Shelby Forthwright) to begin Operation Cleanup. This would be a two-pronged approach. The first aspect was to evacuate the population of Earth into the solar system on a fleet space cruisers led by the Axiom. This kept the general population both safe from and ignorant of the rising toxicity levels in the atmosphere. It also cleared the way for the second aspect: the WALL-E robots that would compact the waste that littered the planet, feeding the incinerators that would burn the waste and filter away the toxic fumes. The plan was for Earth to be cleaned in five years, at which point the cruisers and their passengers would return home to a planet that–at the very least–was no longer deadly.

As we all know, that did not happen. The cleanup aspect of Operation Cleanup suffered an insurmountable setback and CEO Forthwright, by now the only member of BnL's board remaining on the planet, declared the operation a failure and issued directive A113, causing the BnL space cruisers to remain in space until today.

Operation Cleanup was a last-ditch effort to salvage what was left of Earth after generations of mismanagement by Buy N Large. At the annual Principal Shareholders Meeting of 2117, a small but vocal group of shareholders petitioned (loudly) for BnL to do something about the rapidly growing mountains of waste and debris near their homes. CEO Forthwright, having heard this several times over the past decade, was dismissive of the claims at first. However, when one particular BnL-branded landfill grew to such an extent that the debris was level with his penthouse window, he realized the extent of the damage. He assembled his leadership team and charged them to come up with a plan to quickly get the waste on the planet down to a more reasonable level. "My reasoning?" he said. "It is not that there's trash. It's that there's so much of it people are running out of space. And if they don't have space, where will they put the things they buy from us? So wha'd'ya say we try to clean some of this junk up?"

The working plan for Operation Cleanup was largely the work of Doctor Samuel Marion. A graduate of BnL University at Clemson, Dr. Marion rose through the ranks of the BnL engineering department due to his reliance on "brute force" methods. While other students and engineers prided themselves on taking time to develop more efficient or elegant solutions, BnL management preferred Dr. Marion's workable solutions that were simple to understand and quick to implement though more costly in the long run. The cornerstone of Dr. Marion's plan was the BnL fleet of space cruisers. In the original draft, he called for the population to be evacuated while "an army of semi-automatous flamethrowers single-handedly incinerates the garbage."

This plan was decried by Doctor Patrick Ketner as "a sophomoric excuse for wanton destruction." Dr. Ketner himself suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and his plan reflected that. He called for the garbage to first be organized and cleaned up. Once it was properly segmented off from the rest of the planet, it could be dealt with in an orderly fashion.

The final plan for Operation Cleanup is credited to Professor Miles Johnston. While not a doctor, he was