Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair

Companies manage their supply chains with meticulous precision and economy, but none bother to understand the removal chain of products. To better understand what happens to things after we’ve discarded them, SENSEable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) outfitted thousands of pieces of trash with GPS tracking devices. The team describes the endeavor as creating smart trash. Humes explains, “the creators of smart trash wanted to expose how waste gets where it’s going—the meandering, mysterious and, it turns out, occasionally disturbing path it takes after it is thrown away” (147).

For the first part of their experiment, they tagged random bits of trash, categorized them, and scattered them in the waste stream throughout Seattle. Doing so afforded preliminary results and let them know the trackers worked. In 2009 they commenced stage two by releasing 600 pieces of trash outfitted with trackers, contributed by community members. Soon after, researchers disposed of 2,200 more individually selected pieces of smart trash, comprising a variety of materials from paper to e-waste. Weeks later, researchers and contributors gathered to observe the results of their experiment: Electronic devices traveled further than any other waste category because only specialized facilities can recycle them, and the global waste stream was full of costly and environmentally harmful inefficiencies that could be rectified by handling waste more locally.