TRASHY TRAILS: The creators of Trash Track hope to shed light on where recycling finally happens and how much energy is wasted getting it there.
Image: istockphoto/SergeyZavalnyuk
"Smart" phones offer the intelligence of a computer, with the convenience of a phone. "Smart" meters let homeowners choose between using cheap and expensive electricity.
The next frontier: "smart" trash?
A 5-year-old group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spent the last year attaching thousands of tracking devices to pieces of garbage in Seattle and New York City. The devices send out pulses to signal where they are.
The signals go to MIT's SENSEable City Lab for analysis. Last year, they also went to art exhibits in both cities, where live maps revealed the many paths garbage takes.
For example, a plastic soap bottle tossed in a Manhattan recycling bin took several twists and turns around the city before crossing the river to Kearny, N.J.
Carlo Ratti, who directs the City Lab, said each city he's lived in -- Turin, Italy; Paris; Cambridge, England; Boston -- has suffered from congestion, pollution and inefficiency problems.
He believes new technologies, like iPhones, social networking and wireless communication, can inform city dwellers and make cities "smarter." "The only way we can actually solve some of the big problems, like climate change, is if we really coordinate and act together," Ratti said. "What, for the first time, is really bringing us together is the power of networks in general and the Internet."
One product was the "Copenhagen Wheel," a device that attaches to a bicycle and offers information on how much people are riding and where -- in addition to giving a little boost on the uphill. The lab has also designed interactive screens for bus stops that can communicate with an iPhone, tailoring advertisements to riders or serving as a larger screen for hand-held diversions.
What your garbageman can't tell you
The aim of project "Trash Track": to study where recyclables go. Dietmar Offenhuber, a doctoral student in the lab, said there's plenty of research on how things are made, but little is known about how they degrade and finally disappear. Among the questions here -- especially for cities paying millions for recycling programs -- are how much greenhouse gas is created and how much energy is wasted in the process. Another might be whether recycling really happens.
"Even the people working in waste removal don't really have a clear knowledge or picture of where the stuff goes," he said.
That's partly because trash goes through so many handoffs en route to its final destination, Offenhuber said. Trash companies follow their own haul, for example. But once they separate the aluminum and sell it to a collector, their records end. No single database tracks a soda can through its cycle.
Environmental groups and sustainability-minded cities have taken interest in the technology, since it could add credibility to the recycling system. There's been cause for doubt, particularly with electronic waste.
Last November, the CBS program "60 Minutes" followed a suspicious crate leaving a Denver-area company that claimed to recycle its e-waste in the United States. The crate ended up in Hong Kong -- illegally, since the United States prohibits export of e-waste containing hazardous materials like lead.
Some very long trails to follow
The investigation also found gruesome health conditions in a Chinese town whose economy was devoted to scrapping e-waste. The story said a mass underground industry transfers electronics from wealthier nations to poor, less-regulated countries.
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5 Comments
Add CommentThis was a very intersting topic I came across a few years ago, as I always wondering how much effort/efficiency gets wasted at recycling plants. I always wondering how they sorted certin recycleables, like a paper envalope typicall used for mail/junk mail has a little piece of plastic taped to cover the address field. What seperates the plastic and paper, does it waste more energy recycling that than it would to re-create it? Trash has never sounded so interesting...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe must make recycling more positively motivating, so everyone gets into it. More recycling depo's can also be set up to reuse containers in schools, by hobbyists, and artists, etc. Berkeley, Ca. has a few good ones; can't all towns and cities? It saves a lot of money and waste. As hobbyists, we reuse glass, cardboard, string, plastic, etc, for useable crafts! Please promote this trend.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSimple cleaning or washing of synthetic trash before dumping it may lead to more positive returns, especially if occasional tracking allows us to know that it doesn't get remixed with filth to becomes needlessly expensive to transport and re-sort.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thismay lead, how?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thismay lead, how?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this