THE Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of my favourite places on the planet. Its sprawling campus runs at a thousand ideas an hour, and it's there that I recently found out an absolute humdinger of an invention. It aims to show that when it comes to throwing stuff away, there's no such thing as "away" .
The project emerged from the SENSEable City Laboratory, run by Carlo Ratti, which harnesses sensors and hand-held electronics to help describe cities in a new way. As urban environments become ever more complicated and interconnected, they present us with new opportunities to study how they work – and to make them better places to live in.
On my visit to the lab, I stared at a computer screen as a map of Rome exploded with movement and flickering colour, showing the ebb and flow of Italian football fans as they surged into squares and bars after their team won the World Cup. The secret was to use mobile calls made by the fans to monitor their antics: when the game heated up, so did the call rate.
Now the professor wants to use the same simple mobile-phone technology to reveal the journeys taken by familiar everyday objects after we throw them out. The hope is that it will help to deal with one of the most pressing urban problems, both in practical and aesthetic terms: rubbish.
We are all used to the idea of separating different kinds of rubbish: a bin for this, a skip for that, a box for the other. But how do you know that all your diligent efforts paid off in the end?
This is where Ratti's Trash Track project comes in. His team have developed tags consisting of a battery-powered Sim card and motion sensor, encased in resin, which updates them about the location of a piece of rubbish every 15 minutes for up to eight weeks.
Lewis Girod, who designed the tags, says they can use the mobile phone network to pinpoint an object to within 100 metres or so in the city, and around half a mile in the country.
Ratti likens the use of these tags to injecting a radioactive substance into a patient in order to find blockages that might be causing health problems.
In this case, the blockages are problems with a city's waste-disposal system: by tracking the final resting place of pieces of waste, from coffee cups to fluorescent bulbs, they can discover whether stuff that can be recycled ends up in a landfill. That applies not just to glass and plastics, but valuable (or toxic) substances such as gold, aluminium, nickel, copper, zinc, lead, cadmium and mercury, too.
As soon as he had spelt out the potential, I asked Carlo if I could get hold of some tags for a pilot project. A few months later, I was able to sit in London and watch a similar screen, tracking 60 pieces of rubbish in Seattle. Each one had a story to tell.
On July 12, Musstanser Tinauli, an MIT project leader, threw a digital camera into a roadside rubbish bin in south Seattle. Two days later, it turned up in a residential area to the south, presumably adopted by a new owner. A clapped-out Dell laptop belonging to Ewen Callaway was donated to the Computer Recycling Service store in the suburb of Green Lakes, north of the city. Within a few days it, too, seemed to have found a new home.
Detective work by a colleague of mine, Catherine Brahic, revealed how 11 pieces, including a Spiderman shoe, a keyboard and a laptop battery, ended up near two recycling facilities. Three items ended up in shipping yards. A toy tossed into a recycling bin in western Seattle turned up five days later on a hill south of the city, near Maple Valley.
Overall, only two pieces of garbage found their way to Seattle's main landfill in Oregon: the city's waste-sorting appeared to be working.
"Trash Track has the potential to encourage people to make more sustainable decisions," says Assaf Biderman, director of the lab. He believes it will help us move closer to a garbage utopia where we recycle or reuse everything we can, with the help of far tinier, and far cheaper, versions of the tags.
Next month, the project will go large-scale, as 3,000 more pieces of garbage are tagged in New York and Seattle. But we are also offering 10 British residents the chance to tag their own property for an experiment over here. Nominations close tomorrow, so visit newscientist.com/projects/forms/trash to submit your ideas for what I reckon is the best rubbish experiment ever.
* Roger Highfield is the editor of 'New Scientist', and will be writing a regular column for 'The Daily Telegraph'
I like the idea that the guy in charge of this project is named Professor Ratti.
Goes to show you Len Deighton's dictum on comedy is true: there's no need to invent to create humour, the truth is sufficiently hilarious.
Paul, Southampton
on September 29, 2009
at 08:31 AM
It's certainly a consideration, with possible solutions to hand...
http://bit.ly/1Fa0d9
I refuse to beleive that 99% of the rubbish we throw out cannot be recycled in some fashion. clothes can be shreded and turned into insulation, paper pulped ot make new paper, plastic bags again, shredded and sorted into filling or new plastics, metal melted down and recast.
The tricky bit comes with the energy needed to do this, and the cost of sorting it all. Here machines come in for most of the work, but they need power. Thus, incinerators.
Every council should have a composter where all organic waste is put. Recycling is difficult and it needs massive investment that we don't seem to want to do, yet it would be a better investment than wind farms could ever be.
@gerry on September 29, 2009 at 10:41 AM
"The only thing Planet Earth needs saving from is people."
I think you'll find the Earth is quite capable of looking after itself, gerry, having survived various assaults, including by a Mars-sized planetoid and numerous comets, asteroids and such.
If the Earth decides that homo sapiens is a problem, then the Earth will deal with it, and in the blink of an eye in geological time, it will be as if we had never existed.
@gerry on September 29, 2009 at 10:41 AM
"The only thing Planet Earth needs saving from is people."
I think you'll find the Earth is quite capable of looking after itself, gerry, having survived various assaults, including by a Mars-sized planetoid and numerous comets, asteroids and such.
If the Earth decides that homo sapiens is a problem, then the Earth will deal with it, and in the blink of an eye in geological time, it will be as if we had never existed.
Gerry is quite right .... the only hope of saving the planet is to reduce the human population dramatically. In 1960 there were about 2 billion humans, now there are 6.5 billion and predicted to be 9 billion in 40 years. This is utterly unsustainable and it is laughable that politicians do not have the intellect to realise this.
Would it not be more constructive to tag objects in a way which allows automated sorting at rubbish tips, rather than tagging them to find them when they didn't get disposed of properly?
This idea picks up the outliers, when what is required is to recycle the majority.
IMHO.
Would it not be more constructive to tag objects in a way which allows automated sorting at rubbish tips, rather than tagging them to find them when they didn't get disposed of properly?
This idea picks up the outliers, when what is required is to recycle the majority.
IMHO.
The only thing Planet Earth needs saving from is people.
This would cost the earth, but here goes...why don't we fly cargo planes full of biodegradable garbage to the advancing lines of deserts and drop them there. A nice thick line of nourishing garbage might stop the desert in its tracks. Whaddya think ?
Can we please tag the rubbish at Fat Al Gore's many mansions, earned from the derived proceeds of his great work at fluting up another cobra snake (for its oil)-- called carbon credits; our next financial cross.
When that bankers' panjandrum stops his tricks, raises the money for a fleet of ships to dredge up the floating plastic rubbish "icebergs" (the ones to really worry about), I'll take him seriously.
Having got that off my chest....power to this project.
At least we know where the plastic ends up already!
I think we should tag every sort of rubbish properly sorted in accordance with Draconian local council rules and the hideous multiple bins outside every house that obtains in places like Hove - and where the eyesore quotient is compounded by multiple occupancy of very large older houses.
I would be both saddened and ironically pleased to prove that all this coerced activity by individual householders leads to the whole lot being dumped in landfill by feckless councils and their contractors and so many people already suspect.
This was done better years ago when we all provided unsorted waste in ordinary bins that were sorted centrally - in the age before excess packaging of food and the like went mad. I'd be quite happy to be proved totally wrong - and of course councils must not be pre-warned as to the exercise.
Yeah. Sounds like a whole lot of rubbish to me
A thousand ideas a minute? This idea reminds me of the one about a thousand monkeys typing for a thousand years will eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare - "to tag or not to tag that is the qudfg wetlkj.... " - keeping writing MIT!
So about these tag thingies, then. Are they themselves not rubbish? We know what happens to rubbish, so why create even more? How about not doing this project and not creating a whole load of tags which will require material and energy resources to make?