Starting October 1st, North Carolinans will no longer be able to dispose of motor oil filters, wooden pallets and plastic bottles in landfills.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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Discover what really happens with your recyclables. It’s time for another round of That’s Just Weird.

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World class adventurer, National Geographic Emerging Explorer, and a descendant of the legendary Rothschild banking family, David de Rothschild, will attempt to do what no one has done before, sail half-way around the world from California to Australia on a catamaran made 90% of recycled plastic waste powered only by the wind and the sun.

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.

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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.

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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.

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So get your thinking caps on, brush up on your upcycling and take that trash and turn it into treasure for the SMART Art ‘Trash into Treasure’ competition. Your sculpture, functional item, photograph, video or music could net you fame and fortune, or a winning cash prize, as long as you can show reuse.

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Well, this is a bit of fresh air, especially with tween news like Baby-Faced Boy Alfie Patten Is Dad At 13.

12-year-old Max Wallack stole the show at Design Squad’s Trash to Treasure contest with his “Home Dome.” The contest asked kids to repurpose trash into practical inventions.

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This week at ZapRoot: Is Google destroying the planet one search at a time? The recycling market has gone bust. And check out “That’s Just Weird.”

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Dave created less trash in all of 2008 than an average American family throws out in a week. And more impressively, he achieved this eco-feat while drinking beer and eating potato chips.

“I didn’t want to change the way that I was living my life,” Dave says. “If I wanted to drink beer, I wasn’t going to say, well, I can’t find a way to drink beer without creating packaging, so therefore I’m not going to. Instead, what I’m going to do is look at the packaging in beer and pick the most ‘eco-friendly’ way to do it.”

The idea behind Dave’s project was to focus on things people could do without drastically changing their entire lifestyle. “There are definitely people out there who have done similar things where they’ve cut everything out of their life,” Dave says. “A lot of people who are really really hardcore have emailed me and said, ‘You know, you can just not eat potato chips.’ Well, yeah, but I wanna eat potato chips!”

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The town of Lowell, Ind., is examining whether or not to build a $ 200 million plant that would convert garbage into ethanol.

Though such a plant might conjure up visions of the “Mr. Fusion” unit in Doc Brown’s DeLorean, the plants could create 165 permanent jobs and 400 construction jobs in the small town southwest of Gary.

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Jessberger reportedly collects items that people in his neighborhood set out as trash. With some cleaning and fixing, most of the items he collects are good as new. He donates thousands of dollars worth of cleaned-up items to charity every year and sells the rest at an annual yardsale, which he has used to pay for seven vacations over the past several years.

The problem is this: taking trash without permission is illegal in Bexley. From the Columbus Dispatch:

Jessberger has proposed that Bexley issue trash-collecting licenses to “people of good character,” but the city’s police chief argues it’s an invitation to for-profit scrap collectors and identity thieves.

Jessberger has received warnings from police twice. But after the 49-year-old resident spoke up at a City Council meeting, Bexley Police Chief Larry Rinehart said he was going to tell officers they need to start writing citations.

Hopefully, they can resolve this issue so that Jessberger can keep recycling without opening the town to “unsavory characters” and other problems. In general, the community supports what he’s doing, and one neighbor even jokingly has offered to buy him a mask and cape.

Natural Beeswax product manufacturer Burt’s Bees recently gave their employees hazmat suits and had them jump into two weeks’ worth of company trash. What some people will do to keep their job…

Actually, what they found was surprising. When the clouds of dirt and dust cleared, they had found recyclables that will total $25,000 in annual savings for the company. Burt’s Bee has “zero waste to landfills” by 2020 goal, and over the last several months they’ve gone from 40 tons of waste per month down to just 10 tons per month, according to president and CEO John Replogle.

And what better way to get closer to that goal than dumping the garbage from the past two weeks into the company’s parking lot and having employees sort through it? Actually, this exercise has helped employees be more accountable for the things they’re throwing away, something that a memo couldn’t possibly achieve. They’ve also done other green-related activities to drive the message home, and employees who are repeat recycling offenders face disciplinary action.

Think twice before you put your recyclable items out for pick-up.  You may find that many plastic or glass containers can have multiple uses.  I’ve found several crafty ways to use some:

Individual serving sized yogurt containers make great paint pots for the kids.  They can be used to hold water or paint.

Peel off the label of a pickle jar.  Wash, rinse and allow it to dry.  Now, fill it up will all those stray buttons you have.  Jars also make great containers for glue sticks, embroidery floss, ribbon and craft sticks (recycled frozen treat sticks).  They can also be used as a way to keep your paintbrushes, colored pencils and other tools neat and tidy.

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An Atlanta, GA-based company called Geoplasma is using trash to provide power to 50,000 homes in Florida. The company’s plasma refuse plant, which should be online by 2011, is a first for the United States. It will process 1,500 tons of garbage each day and send 60 MW of power to the grid.

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