In Manhattan last Thursday night,I stopped by the NY Future Mobility Meetup at BMW’s iVentures HQ on Morton street. With Bavarian Motor Works the sponsor of this meetup, you’d think the discussion would be car-centric. Kein! Instead there was an off-message talk on tracking household garbage with cell-phone chips, and encouraging hybrid bicycle use in Copenhagen.
Eric Baczuk, GE Research Fellow at MIT’s Senseable City explained that the garbage tagging project, code name Trash Track, explored the under-appreciated but critical to a greener economy “removal chain”. That’s the flip side of the better known supply-chain and covers the process of collecting, transporting, and disposing of bottles, cans, batteries, table scraps, and old laptops. And if you think it’s easy attaching modified cell-phone chips from Qualcomm to cat food cans, you can read more about the entire effort here.
The MIT team organized 500 volunteers in Seattle to bring their trash to Seattle Public Library and then worked together to tag 3000 separate pieces of le garbage. The point of the exercise was to monitor the cell phone calls made by the trash on its road trip. Through CellD triangulation, the chips could roughly capture location of the roving refuse as it rambled through the removal chain.
Baczuk presented a visualization revealing that garbage can ramble quite far. In some cases from its Seattle starting point to the tip of Florida. While it wasn’t possible to be completely precise, it was clear that, say, electronic and hazardous waste garbage ended up in recycling facilities all over the country, sometimes taking weeks to reach a final resting place. Paper and plastics tended to be more of a 2- or 3- fare zone traveler, staying pretty close to the Seattle area.
“We wanted to start thinking about what the carbon implications were of this. Because all this garbage was moving around for months on end …so was that the most efficient way to manage the waste stream,” Baczuk informed us.
Not all the chips went undamaged and garbage that was shipped overseas to more distant locations was not tracked. Baczuk said the next generation of the chip will have embedded GPS to cover this possibility.
You can learn more about another MIT Senseable City project to create a light, self-charging hybrid bike for the city of Copenhagen here.