The Future of Trash: 4 Ways Tech Is Improving Recycling Rates



The world is now inhabited by 7 billion individuals, and as you can imagine, we produce a lot of trash. In the U.S., each person produces 4.6 pounds of trash each day, and 132 million tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) were discarded in landfills in 2009. Just over 35% of that was recycled.

For context, here are some stats: Greece recycles about 10% of its waste, the UK about 17% and Austria about 60%. Back in 2008, the European parliament passed a measure to achieve a recycling rate of 50% for household waste and 70% for construction waste.

There are several ways to go about this improving recycling rates and reducing waste. On the island of Taiwan, the government has forgone curbside trash cans and established detailed and mandatory trash collection schedules in a quest to minimize waste, since there's no room for landfills. In Germany, which leads the world in waste reduction, the Green Dot program's strict rules dictate how citizens dispose of 30 million tons of garbage each year, helping the country reduce its waste by one million tons each year.

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Landfilling is the easy way out, costing about one-third as much as a waste energy facility, says Bryan Staley, vice president of the Environmental Research and Education Foundation, a private, grant-making institution that supports solid waste research and education initiatives. But governments and waste management companies are looking for innovative ways to recycle more products, to make waste more sustainable and to incentivize people to pay attention to their waste output. Waste management is a $75 billion industry with 20,000 players. One tool they're using is technology.

"Sit in the front of a garbage truck, and it literally looks like a cockpit of a 737," says Staley. "It is amazing how complex the driver's seat is for these garbage trucks."

And it's amazing what tech can do for our throwaways. Read on for four methods of high tech trash collection.

1. RFID Tracking

Staley says RFID technology allows for "nonhuman interaction of providing data related to solid waste pickup and collection activities" — the stats can't be monkeyed around with. RFID technology has been around for several years, but its implementation in the waste management sector has boomed in the past five.

With an RFID tag on one's trash cans and an RFID reader on the garbage truck, a city can verify where and when pickups are being done — there's an electronic record of the truck's route, along with a time stamp and geospatial stamp. If you use RFID on recycling bins, you can track participation rates and know who recycled, then at the end of a route, you can calculate how many recyclables are in the load and how many homes the items came from, thus yielding how many recyclables there are per household. This information can help analysts see what demographics are participating in recycling programs — you can easily compare a neighborhood with $1 million homes to a Section 8 housing neighborhood. In areas where participation is low, the city can create incentive programs.

RFID Smart Bins are in use in 44 cities in the U.S., including Philadelphia, Cleveland, Los Angeles and Houston.

2. Pay As You Throw

Another system that can be implemented with RFID tags is Pay As You Throw — add a scale to the truck and you can figure out the weight of the garbage being tossed by each home. Charge by the pound (the customer's account is linked to the RFID tag), and you'll be incentivizing customers to minimize their waste.

This works in a perfect world, since "everybody starts perking up when you hit them in the wallet," says Staley. But PAYT fails in dense urban areas, like New York City, where apartment buildings can house dozens of residents whose trashed gets lumped together, making it impossible to know who tossed what or how much. And the system is subject to abuses, where one could drop off a bag of trash at a nearby convenience store and evade the garbage fees. PAYT works best in middle- and upper-middle-income areas, where the cost per pound won't leave a notable dent in the wallet.

Pay As You Throw is currently in place in 2,000 U.S. communities, the Netherlands and has been considered in the UK.

3. Strategic Placement of Recycling Bins

If you're in the park, and you've just finished up your bottle of water, do you throw it in a garbage can, or do you hold onto it until you finding a recycling bin? It's certainly not convenient to hold on to it, but Staley says some people are socially and environmentally conscious enough to do just that, and an EREF grant is out to WeRecycle at the University of Georgia to analyze this very phenomenon — how human behavior influences recycling rates.

The research involves GPS-equipped readers on trash cans that send a signal conveying how many bottles have been thrown out in that can. All of the data from the study is wired up to a website, so you can click on a map and see where all the cans are and see the recycling rates at each one. The results will help determine where recycle bins should be placed in order to maximize recycling rates. WeRecycle also has an Android app that helps people find the nearest trash and recycling bins, which is especially useful at big events and parades.

In dense urban areas, only 20% of recyclable bottles are actually recycled, says Staley, suggesting that a few strategically placed bins could go a long way. He adds that most people consume bottled water when they're on the go, and if there's no recycling bin on the street or in a park, then that bottle is likely not going to get recycled.

"Human behavior plays a large role in recycling," says Staley, adding that catering to human behavior could go a long way to increased recycling rates.

4. Gasification

What may be trash to you could be energy for someone else. A lot of energy, considering that only 2% of the energy potential in solid waste is used. Companies like Enerkem in Canada, Geoplasma in Florida and Ze-Gen in Boston are converting waste into biofuels through gasification technology. The process (Ze-Gen's is shown above) generates clean, sustainable, low-cost synthesis gas — a "syngas" — comprised of carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas. Syngas is 50% of the density of natural gas, and has multiple uses: a replacement for fossil fuels, a building block for liquid fuel production, a way to refine crude oil, a catalyst for thermal ethanol production, and it can be processed into green diesel fuel.

Basically, these companies chemically recycle the carbon molecules from waste, creating products and transportation fuels, though each company has a slightly different pitch:

  • Enerkem transforms the syngas into "cellulosic ethanol" and methanol, which can be used to create a clean-burning fuel. Gasoline with ethanol has more oxygen, which helps it combust more completely, thus reducing emissions.

  • Ze-gen's gasification technology is used to convert ordinary waste into a reliable energy source. One ton of solid waste has the equivalent energy of 600kWh or a barrel of oil.

  • Geoplasma uses electricity and high-pressure air to create a super hot plasma that vaporizes waste and creates syngas, which is used to turn an electrical turbine. It currently processes 1,500 tons of garbage each day.

While gasification is a great conversion mechanism, it hasn't been able to scale as a widespread solution.

Even in a perfect world, one in which everything that could be recycled is recycled, Staley says the maximum rate of recycling would be around 60% or 70% — with a realistic recycling rate around 50% or 60%. "We’re going to lose a certain amount into a landfill regardless," he says. But technology has already made — and will continue to make — great strides in improving recycling and waste management worldwide.

Do you pay as you throw? Are you a big recycler? What system does your neighborhood or country use? Let us know in the comments below.

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Image courtesy of iStockphoto, hroe, JacobH

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