It's Just Your Trash Talkin'
We weren't always so awash in stuff. Four decades ago, the introduction of a technology known as the Universal Product Code, or UPC, enabled grocery stores to streamline the tagging, checking out, and reordering of products, thereby vastly scaling up the volume of inventory they could offer. A typical supermarket in 1974 stocked 9,000 items on its shelves. By 2006, that figure had risen to 45,000, and many of those supermarkets had morphed into super-stores. (Today's Walmart might carry some 85,000 products.) Unfortunately, nobody seems to have thought about where all those radios and recliners would go once consumers were through using them.
"This is sort of a solved problem," says Valerie Thomas, an industrial engineering professor at Georgia Tech. For the past few years, Thomas has been working on a Smart Trash concept based on that same UPC technology. Most people will tell you that they'd like to recycle the things for which they no longer have a use, she points out. The problem is all the time, effort, and money it often takes to make that happen.
"I think trash cans as we know them will disappear," says Thomas, who calls her concept "product self-management." "Not to the extent that the chair will go walking off," she clarifies. What she has in mind is a system that would simplify the process by which the chair could move from one user to the next. She is working on a prototype of a recycling bin outfitted with a bar-code reader that would register details about whatever cell phone or cowboy boot you've just thrown in. As is the case with today's UPCs, the information corresponding to the bars would be stored in a central database, in this case at a waste company or a website like eBay. On the basis of that information -- including the make, model, and component parts of the item -- the company would determine its value (and that of its parts) to recyclers or secondhand dealers. When the company arrived for pickup, it would download the information and then direct the item to a recycler, secondhand dealer, or e-waste handler as appropriate. Consumers would be rewarded with cash or other incentives.
Ultimately, says Thomas -- who is so dedicated to conservation that she regularly prepares dinner for her family of four on a solar cooker in her suburban backyard -- bar codes may give way to radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, already used for tracking livestock and enabling motorists to zip through tollbooths. The tiny tags can cost as little as seven cents apiece. But there are some hurdles. For starters, manufacturers may have mixed feelings about the idea of their products enjoying continued resale and reuse. And there will be costs involved in setting up the scanning systems and databases. In the case of the UPC, industry decided the ultimate benefits justified the initial outlay, but it may not feel the same about Smart Trash, in which case government regulation could potentially urge it along.
Still, pressure is building, especially where electronics are concerned. Projected shortages of heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, and nickel, as well as China's threats to further restrict exports of the rare-earth metals needed to make mobile phones and flat-screen TVs, mean recycling such goods makes sense on several levels. Thomas recently participated in an EPA working group -- along with representatives from manufacturing, retailing, and recycling -- tasked with exploring how the tags could help with e-waste recycling, and a new federal strategy for e-waste management, released in July, calls for better tracking of used electronics. Once the technology has been adapted for computers and cell phones, she believes, it's only a matter of time before it trickles down to that chair.
Jocelyn Zuckerman is OnEarth's articles editor. The former deputy editor of Gourmet, she won a James Beard Award for feature writing in 2002. She is also an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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