Trashy Travels

Where, exactly, does all that trash go?

To find out, Karin Landsberg of Seattle invited researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Senseable City Laboratory to tag her trash. MIT's electronic bugs would allow Karin to follow the fate of 12 bits of garbage, including a can of beans and a compact fluorescent light bulb.

Apparently, Karin is not the first to get the trash-tagging bug.

According to an article in the New York Times, "The Architectural League of New York went through a similar trash-tagging exercise as part of the same project when it moved its offices from midtown Manhattan to SoHo two weeks ago. Among the discarded items tagged were a coffee cup, a filing cabinet, a book shelf, a broken wine glass and an empty plastic bottle that had held liquid soap." So far, they've learned that their trash made its way through the Lincoln Tunnel.

In the long run, the good folks at MIT plan to display the routes of various items of trash both in real time (online) and in exhibitions opening in New York and Seattle. The hope for the project is to raise awareness among individuals of the impact one person's trash can have on the environment.

"If you see where a plastic bottle ends up, a few miles down the road in a dump, you may want to get tap water or some other container for the water," the exhibition curator said.

Photo courtesy of stock.xchng