Technovations Sidebar: Tracking Trash
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Waste Management, Inc. (WM) says that it wants consumers to understand exactly what happens to water bottles and toothpaste tubes once they’re tossed into the garbage and put out on the curb for pickup. Now, thanks to the Trash Track project — a collaboration between Wast Management and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s SENSEable City Lab — the company hopes to find a technology that makes that journey much clearer.
Starting last year, Waste Management underwrote a project in which MIT placed 3,000 so-called “smart tags” on pieces of trash in New York, Seattle and London. The company says that the smart tags provided real-time data on the whereabouts of the items, which MIT researchers then processed to create map visualizations of the garbage’s progress. In some cases, the company says, the trip is slow: One plastic bottle traveled four days and still hadn’t reached its landfill destination 20 miles away. On the other hand, one aluminum can arrived at a recycling facility in only two days.
Understanding this journey has two potential benefits, according to Waste Management. First it may provide information that can help make company operations more efficient. Public awareness is also a benefit, the company says, because it may lead people to more carefully consider the environmental impact of the items they dispose of. The preliminary results of the tracking program were on view for the public last fall as part of the “Toward the Sentient City” exhibition at the Architectural League in New York, and at the Public Library in Seattle.
