For the past two years, founder Monica Ralli of UrthBags in California, developed strategies to inspire people. Her goal was to create a stronger sense of eco-consciousness on our overly-disposable planet.
Monica also planned how to stimulate the job market. She intended to provide work that would benefit local craftsmen and women’s organizations worldwide. Simultaneously, waste would be reduced significantly.
The handbag materials are milk cartons, juice boxes, telephone books, and newspapers. The craftspeople are artisans from across the globe. Designers are both staffed and sourced.
Researchers at MIT’s SENSEable City Lab have developed smart tags to be attached to individual pieces of your trash and send its location back in real time.
Where did that candy bar wrapper go after you tossed it in your trash bin? Did that juice container with a #1 recycling symbol make it to the recycling center? As soon as we throw something away, we lose our connection to it. We don’t stop to wonder where the trash goes - does it get burned, go to landfill, or get placed on a boat?
These questions and more will be answered by Trash Track, an information system designed to monitor the path your garbage takes when it leaves your bin. Researchers at MIT’s SENSEable City Lab have developed smart tags to be attached to individual pieces of your trash and send its location back in real time. The mobile sensor is akin to a miniature cell phone, encased in a type of resin to ensure its durability throughout its journey. Since cell phone technology is ubiquitous and cheap, Trash Track should be able to capture the location of trash globally. The team is looking to expose the “removal chain” of trash.
Would you be so cavalier in throwing out a disposable razor if you knew how much it actually impacted your local environments? Would you think twice about purchasing a bottle of water if you knew how much it cost you to dispose of? That’s the question asked by the MIT SENSEable City lab these days. And they plan to see what effects one man’s trash actually has on the environment.
Inspired by the Green NYC Initiative which aims to increase the rate of waste recycling in New York to almost 100 percent by 2030 (currently, only about 30 percent of the city’s waste is diverted from landfills for recycling!), a group of MIT researchers have developed a program that uses special electronic tags in order to track different types of waste on their journey through the disposal systems of New York and Seattle. Its name? Trash Track. Trash Track will monitor the patterns and costs of urban disposal while raising public awareness about the impacts the garbage can under the sink has on the environment.
A foul stench rises from the grey-black water as I wait for the riverboat. Kids jump in and climb back out, laughing a screaming. Old tires line the floating dock to protect the boats. I look down into the water toward my reflection, but it isn’t there. The grey water swallows everything. This is Bangkok’s Khlong Saen Saeb.
Khlong, or canals as they’re more popularly called, run throughout the city of Bangkok, giving Bangkok the moniker “The Venice of the East.” These Khlong were built centuries ago for transportation and trade. Khlong Saen Saeb was constructed in 1837 as a means of transporting soldiers during times of conflict.
While Ecologic Designs (one of my previous posts) is thriving by making practical products out of various waste streams – demonstrating green innovation and up-cycling – some artists around the world are working with a new medium: trash. These artists are coming together, actively gathering vast quantities of debris floating up on shorelines or collecting waste wherever it might be piling up and turning it into beautiful pieces of art.
On a trip to Santa Monica, California, a friend treated my family and I to an amazing – if not also disturbing and mind-opening – display of crocheted sculptures created from trash. The exhibit, Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reefs by the Institute for Figuring, was displayed in several rooms of the Track 16 Gallery at Bergamot Station. The Institute For Figuring (IFF) is an organization dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts.
Created and curated by Christine and Margaret Wertheim, the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef exhibit was a stunning display of an ingenious use of waste materials, creativity and community, bringing together various reefs created by artists from around the world. The exhibition also brought attention to the plight of our oceans and the depository for our trash that it’s become, accidental or otherwise. The Crochet Coral Reef Project of the Institute For Figuring is conceived as “a woolly celebration of the intersection of higher geometry and feminine handicraft, and a testimony to the disappearing wonders of the marine world.”
New York’s Ontario County is exploring the possibility of turning garbage into gas at the county’s landfill.
The county is debating whether to let Casella Waste Systems, which runs the landfill in the town of Seneca, build a $5 million pilot plant there. If the pilot proves successful, a $100 million plant could eventually be built on the site, reports the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. The idea will be debated at a public hearing tonight.
Currently the landfill takes in about 2,200 tons of trash a day from 33 counties, other states and Canada.
However this is not the first journey to be made across the Pacific using plastic waste. Last year a raft made of 15,000 bottles called the Junk successfully made a similar journey from California to Hawaii in 87 days in order to promote awareness of the global plastic waste problem.
In less than one day, nearly 400,000 volunteers in 104 countries found and collected 11,439,086 items of litter from beaches and waterways.
The garbage cleanup was part of the Ocean Conservancy’s annual Coastal Cleanup. Information about the types of garbage found during the cleanup was compiled into a report that will help planners to understand and address the problem of litter.
I may be biased by my happy life in South Korea, but still I think there are two things that Japan does better. Firstly, Japan excels at making foreign tourists feel like rock stars. Several years back on a school exchange trip to Hokkaido, my group and I received enough popular adoration to make us feel like the Beatles in their heyday. Secondly, Japan is immaculate. For instance, Sapporo may be the fifth biggest city in Japan with a population just larger than Manhattan’s, but when I visited there I saw neither a single plastic bag nor newspaper littering the streets.
Now, it must be said by way of comparison that Korean cities are by and large much cleaner than American ones. Or at least it’s fair to say that the dodgiest parts of Korea’s large cities are still much nicer than their American counterparts. Almost unimaginable in Korea are the dingy, urine stained shop fronts of San Francisco’s Market Street or the sprawling cardboard-house ghettos of LA’s Skid Row. However, almost everywhere you go in Korea you’re unfortunately bound to run into litter.
For the past two years, founder Monica Ralli of UrthBags in California, developed strategies to inspire people. Her goal was to create a stronger sense of eco-consciousness on our overly-disposable planet.
