

When your product lives in a dumpster, not so much.
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Consumer IoT products can count on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and prioritize aesthetics. Gates calls garbage collection “one of the pillars of society.” Any gadget that joins the process needs to be rugged and reliable, even at construction sites and other areas where connectivity can be spotty.

Some futurists might see today’s shiniest Internet of Things technologies as indistinguishable from garbage, but for IoT companies serving the waste management industry the clever phrase can take on literal meaning.Ĭompology, a San Francisco startup, is applying sensors and machine intelligence to dumpsters and garbage trucks - and co-founder Jason Gates tells Postscapes that the team works hard to understand the specific needs of waste management and to design technology that gets the job done. We are also developing participatory platforms that will help them to organize their activities and connect the cooperative to the citizens."Ĭase Study: Smart waste bins on the streets of Berlin
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We are using location-detecting hardware and software to investigate how Catadores, informal recyclers in Brazilian cities, find and collect material in the city. "The Forage Tracking project is mapping the tacit knowledge and spatial organization of informal recyclers. Senseable City Lab: Forage Tracking - Tools for Participatory Recycling Management 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." Can these same pervasive technologies make 100% recycling a reality? "Elaborated by the SENSEable City Lab and inspired by the NYC Green Initiative, TrashTrack focuses on how pervasive technologies can expose the challenges of waste management and sustainability. "With the tagline "instant cash for phones" the ecoATM kiosk's use the Axeda cloud platform and built in diagnostic tools to analyze the condition and quality of old consumer devices (currently targeting cellphones) and give users cash on the spot for their used electronics saving them from years of sitting in the junk drawer of your house and out of landfills creating toxic eWaste."
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This inefficiency is largely due to outdated manual collection methods and logistical processes which lack efficient data-driven solutions. Although these waste management services exist in nearly every community, the industry’s current operating standards have proven inefficient and highly resource-intensive. From densely populated cities to smaller rural communities, waste management systems keep our homes and communities free from unwanted clutter.
