Tracking Trash from Can to Pile

Trackers are really nothing new.  James Bond was slapping homing devices on evil-doers cars back in the 60’s.

Now, thanks to ever smaller and more powerful devices, these trackers are on to more scientific work.

The team behind the experiment, MIT’s Senseable City lab, led by Carlo Ratti, have made a device that is about the size of a small matchbox and that works like a cell phone – without the phone bit. A SIM card inside the chip blips out its location every 15 minutes, the signal is picked up by local cell phone antennae and the chip’s location is relayed back to MIT.

Ratti’s team and New Scientist have already deployed a test run of 50 tracked items of trash ranging from paper cups to computers in Seattle. Several thousand more will be released in Seattle and New York garbage cans later this summer and we’ll chuck a batch into the London trash for good measure.    LINK

Eventually, the team hopes to track hundreds of types of trash from the moment they are tossed to their eventual final resting place.  Imagine being able to get this data as a Google Maps layer.

I wonder if there would be any positive impact on our own trash habits if we actually saw where every single item we tossed actually ended up?  I think the whole “out of sight, out of mind” mentality makes it incredibly easy to toss without care.

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