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The "trash tag," a remote cellular device used to track garbage movements within the waste disposal system. (Courtesy of Senseable City Laboratory)
MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory is conducting experiments on garbage in Seattle through a program called "Trash Track." Utilizing "smart tag" technology, the team has created a device around the size of a matchbook with its own SIM card. The tag is placed inside a piece of garbage or recycling, then every 15 minutes pings the cell system to locate itself. This allows researchers at MIT to track the course of waste from the time its expelled by the user until it eventually winds up somewhere.
The team has already done a trial run with a Starbucks cup here in Seattle. Over the summer, they'll be putting more transmitters into the waste system in Seattle, New York City, and London. The results will be presented in Seattle, apparently at the downtown library, in September, but over time, more and more data will be available online, with the promise of eventual real time tracking. They've ever started a blog called Trash Blog that already has a lot of interesting material on the experiment.
Studying the flow of garbage and other waste has become increasingly important. Not only can the research at MIT be used to simply improve the efficiency of waste collection and disposal, but it can also be of use in the more challenging task of preventing garbage from winding up in rivers and other bodies of water.
This is where the research gets really cutting edge. In the recent popular book Flotsametrics and the Floating World, ocean scientist Curtis Ebbesmeyer did similar research by tracking the progress of trash deposited into rivers which feed the world's largest illegal dumps: the oceans.
The single largest collection of waste on earth, millions of pounds of primarily plastic waste, lies in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," oceanic currents have served to collect waste in a large vortex west of Hawaii known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. The mass of human garbage there is estimated to be twice the size of Texas.
The ultimate promise of Trash Track is that it can help us stop feeding places like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, not only by helping us identify how the trash gets from our garbage can to the middle of the Pacific, but also by simply forcing people to look at what happens to their garbage once they toss it in the dumpster or recycling bin.
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Gah, look at those hackneyed Tron-looking vector walls. Who the hell let the MIT Media Lab in here?