What happens to your trash?

I was getting ready to go to bed but first I had to take out the trash that's collected tomorrow. But then there was the NY Times in my email. You know how going to bed at ten ends up going to bed at 2am.

According to the NY Times:

Through the project, overseen by M.I.T.’s Senseable City Laboratory, 3,000 common pieces of garbage, mostly from Seattle, are to be tracked through the waste disposal system over the next three months. The researchers will display the routes in real time online and in exhibitions opening at the Architectural League of New York on Thursday and the Seattle Public Library on Saturday.

The MIT site tells us:

TrashTrack uses hundreds of small, smart, location aware tags: a first step towards the deployment of smart-dust - networks of tiny locatable and addressable microeletromechanical systems.These tags are attached to different types of trash so that these items can be followed through the city’s waste management system, revealing the final journey of our everyday objects in a series of real time visualizations.

I couldn't find where online the garbage is being tracked. At least I can track most of our summer, raw, kitchen vegetable scraps. They go about 50 feet to the compost heap and then get scattered onto our various flower beds after the worms and other bugs take care of them and the leaves and our neighbor's grass clippings.

But it would be interesting to find out where some of the other stuff goes. I hope not out to the trash island floating in the North Pacific.

The Seattle Public Library, which is one of the partners in this, will have an event Saturday, Sep. 19, 2009, 11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.:



But I have to take the trash out now.