Trash Tracking

September 17, 2009

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In my travels along the world’s coastlines I’ve seen thousands of miles of beaches nearly buried beneath plastic waste – bottles, beer crates, flip-flops, fishing cord, etc. – washed up from … well, that’s always an interesting question. Where exactly does all that plastic originate? A lot of it comes from boats (fishing, commercial, cruise, sport), some from landfills built too close the sea and some simply from lazy citizens who still toss garbage of all kind onto the beach or directly into the ocean.The Times has a great piece today about a novel program, being monitored by M.I.T.’s Senseable City Laboratory, which has put tracking devices on three thousand pieces of garbage collected from individuals and businesses from Seattle to New York. The results of their trackings will be displayed in real time online and in exhibitions at the Architectural League on Thursday and the Seattle Public Library on Saturday.

Trash-to-be-tracked, Photo by Kevin P. Casey

What caught my eye was the comment by the lab’s director Carlo Ratti on how the project might impact people to pick up after themselves. “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,” Mr. Ratti told the Times.

I’m going to call M.I.T. and encourage them to expand the program, to attach tracking devices specifically to a wide-range of plastic used near a coastline or on an international container ship and see just how much of it ends up in the ocean … and then what path it takes once there. I wonder if those tracking devices are waterproof?