Here’s a quite affectionate missive to the waste industry by Ron Carlee in the Huffington Post. Entitled “I Love You Because You Are The Garbage Man,” it derides the common practice of labeling “garbage man” as the least desirable and/or important profession and celebrates that occupation’s contribution to society.

Right back ‘atcha, Ron.

After reporting in March about the horrific trash management that accompanied University of Georgia tailgating festivities, it pains me as a UGA alum to admit that in-state rival Georgia Tech seems to have devised a vastly superior approach to collegiate waste collection. Launched in 2008, the school’s Game Day Recycling program recruits student volunteers to help collect recyclables from thousands of football fans as they are tailgating, walking through the campus or inside the stadium during the game. Last season, the program netted 19.3 tons of recyclables in just six games.

“Tailgaters” distribute large blue bags to tailgating fans across campus. Once filled with recyclables, the bags can simply be left on the ground for collection. “Gate keepers” stationed at Bobby Dodd Stadium’s 10 entrance gates encourage arriving fans to recycle outside food and beverage containers (which are not allowed inside). Finally, “stadium attendants” instruct fans inside the stadium to use strategically placed recycling bins and clarify what can and can’t be recycled. Most of the volunteers complete their work before kickoff.

Waste Management has been recruited to assist with this season’s effort. And as an added incentive, a roving video crew films fans who demonstrate exceptionally green behavior for broadcast on the stadium’s JumboTron during the game.

My bulldogs clearly need to learn some new tricks.

Source: www.recycle.gatech.edu

There are a lot of dates in life that are hard to remember: Your boss’s birthday. Your next dentist appointment. Arbor Day. But trash collection day? For most of us, it’s the same day every week or two, barring holidays. And since no one likes trash piling up around their home, there’s plenty of motivation to get the bins to the curb.

Not so in London, Ontario, apparently. There, amateur programmers are cobbling together software specifically designed to help Londoners identify and remember their trash collection day. UnLab, a gathering place for the city’s hackers, is cooperating with London’s solid waste manager to design and distribute the program, which will consist of a website and texts or e-mails alerting residents to impending trash collection.

Unfortunately, this is distracting from more important work, like the creation of an iPhone app that reminds people to take a shower.

Source: The London Free Press

Recently, The Heap has drawn your attention to stories about an island of garbage, an island recycled from garbage and making vacuums out of islands of garbage. To complete the theme, how about an island that vacuums up garbage? Wired provides this great photo story about the 35-year-old pneumatic trash collection system on New York City’s Roosevelt Island.

Embracing a utopian vision, the island’s residential towers were designed to eliminate the need for cars (and, it goes without saying, garbage trucks), allowing for narrower, more pedestrian-friendly streets. Instead, garbage chutes in the towers empty into large sealed tubes that can suck trash over great distances at speeds of 30 to 60 miles per hour thanks to huge turbines. Trash is separated by weight in centrifuges before being emptied into shipping containers that are trucked off to landfills or incinerators. The original system, designed by Swedish company Envac, is still fully functional thanks to careful operation and regular maintenance.

The article notes that the only other pneumatic trash collection system in operation in the United States is at (perhaps unsurprisingly) Disney World. But it’s much more common in Europe.

Well worth a read!

Here’s a genuinely intriguing list of cool, strange, and beautiful — wait for it — trash cans, courtesy of Asylum.co.uk. Frivolous? Perhaps. But it’s got to be satisfying when even your waste bin makes your coworkers feel inadequate.

Tired of receiving pointless Farmville and Mafia Wars updates from your Facebook friends? Want to play a game that actually benefits the world? Oceanopolis, a new Facebook app from Greenopolis, the social media subsidiary of Waste Management, may fit the bill. The game recruits players to collect recyclables on a virtual island that can be redeemed for in-game rewards as well as retail coupons or charitable donations in the real world. More points can be earned by doing real recycling using Greenopolis kiosks.

Oceanopolis is still in beta but Facebook users can sign up and play now. And you don’t even have to feel bad about letting your Farmville plot go to seed.

When it comes to mysterious islands in the Pacific Ocean, anything’s possible. Just ask Ricardo Montalbán and the castaways of “LOST.” Perhaps it’s that brand of fantastical thinking that led Netherlands-based architectural firm WHIM to devise Recycled Island, a floating man-made island constructed of plastic recycled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I’ll give you a moment to wrap your head around that.

The idea, in a clam shell, is to turn a nuisance into a resource. Plastic from the Patch would be collected, sorted and recycled, on site, into the building blocks of a synthetic, seaworthy landmass and the structures atop it. Based on the 4 million tons of available material, WHIM estimates that Recycled Island could ultimately reach the size of Hawaii’s main island (roughly 10,000 square kilometers).

WHIM envisions Recycled Island, still only a research project in its earliest stages, as entirely sustainable and self-sufficient. Farmed seaweed and the composted excretions of the island’s settlers would produce soil to grow crops. Electricity would be generated through solar, wave and wind power. And the island could provide refuge for those displaced by global climate change.

All they need now is a way to clone Hervé Villechaize.

Source: recycledisland.com

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Bill Murray, making an appearance on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” was to pull a stunt in which he dove into a Dumpster outside the studio filled with water and sodden trash (parodying New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s initiative to install temporary public swimming pools made from Dumpsters). Splash. Applause. Cue Paul Shaffer.

But something went awry, because when Murray entered the studio after his aquatic antics, he was bleeding visibly from a gash on his head. Neither Murray nor Letterman mentioned the injury on air (oozing head wounds tend to elicit more “yucks” than yuks), and makeup personnel attempted to camouflage it during a commercial break. Some suspect the head injury is to blame for Murray missing a subsequent scheduled appearance at a screening of his new film “Get Low.”

Few noticed the waterlogged gopher quietly scurrying from the Dumpster pool with large mallet clenched in its teeth.

Source: CBS News

Last week, the New York Times featured “Answers From a Garbologist,” a three-day Q&A column by Dr. Robin Nagle, the anthropologist-in-residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation. You might remember Nagle as the author of a terrific column for Waste Age last July about the anthropological value of landfills or from other pieces we have written about her.

The questions and responses in the Times column cover a broad swath of waste science and lore, from the pedestrian to the profound. All three segments are well worth your time:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

When we make collecting garbage a crime, only criminals will collect garbage! Or something like that. NPR’s Planet Money blog passes along this account of Queens, N.Y., resident Paul Lawrence, who was fined $2,000 and had his car impounded for taking a discarded air conditioner from the curb (with the homeowner’s approval, no less) within sight of a city sanitation worker.

Under New York City law, once trash reaches the curb, it stops being the property of the homeowner and becomes property of the city (a law initially passed to combat rampant theft of recyclables). But should this really be a zero tolerance offense?