Garbage in, garbage out It was bound to happen: our garbage is being watched and traced.	Nic Mokhoff Research Editor
Waste Management is funding an MIT SENSEable City Lab project that uses custom-designed electronic tags to track different types of waste on their final journey through the disposal systems of New York, London, and Seattle. The idea is to get people thinking about what they throw away and how it impacts the environment. "Our aim with Trash Track is to reveal the disposal process of our everyday objects," said Carlo Ratti, director of the SENSEable City Lab. "The project could be considered the urban equivalent of nuclear medicine —where a tracer is injected and followed through the human body to reveal how a system functions." The Trash Track team began a deployment of 3,000 smart tags on waste objects in New York, Seattle, and London. Working with Waste Management, Inc. they are monitoring the path of the trash in real-time. The tags report location data to a central server at MIT, where it is processed and visualized into dynamic maps showing a slice of the city’s waste stream. Wanna see it go down the river? The preliminary results of Trash Track will be unveiled in two new exhibitions from Thursday, September 17 until November 7 at the Architectural League in New York; and on Saturday, September 19 at the Public Library in Seattle. You can watch the movement patterns in real time of different household trash objects through Seattle and New York. Amongst the objects tracked are a Starbucks coffee cup, a plastic yogurt container, an old computer, and a fluorescent light bulb. "Trash Track has the potential to encourage people to make more sustainable decisions about what and how much they consume, and how it affects the world around them," said Assaf Biderman, Associate Director of the SENSEable City Lab. Let's hope so. Lest we swim in our own trash by 2050. Posted by Nic Mokhoff on Sep 17, 2009 11:26 AM in Consumer

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