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

In about two weeks, the eyes of the globe will turn toward South Africa as the 2010 FIFA World Cup commences. As the players from many nations enter the pitch, they will be scoring points not only for their teams but for the viability of recycling. According to Greenopolis (reporting on a story from Ecoterre) all national teams outfitted by Nike will sport jerseys made from recycled plastic bottles culled from landfills in Taiwan and Japan.

From Ecoterre:

Each shirt comprises up to eight recycled plastic bottles, a move that reduces energy consumption by up to 30 percent compared with manufacturing virgin polyester. Besides saving raw materials, Nike also diverted nearly 13 million plastic bottles (or nearly 560,000 pounds of polyester waste) from the landfill—enough to cover more than 29 football pitches.

Waste Age has reported on recycled athletic wear before. Given the importance of new markets for recycled material to the success of recycling, do you feel athletic wear made from recycled plastic is a compelling new sector or just a gimmick?

With sweeping recycling legislation pending in New York City, it’s no wonder trash has been on the minds of New Yorkers. In case you missed them, two recent pieces in the New York Times took on the issue of waste-to-energy (WTE) and disposal of waste. First, a lengthy debate over whether the country should burn or bury its trash. And this week, an op-ed argues for halting export of the city’s waste in favor of burning it in WTE facilities.

Waste Age has reported on stirrings in the WTE sector. What are your thoughts on wider adoption of the practice in New York specifically and in the United States in general?

Okay, maybe it’s not an Oscar, but New Jersey’s Union County Utilities Authority (UCUA) was recently honored with a Silver MERCURY Award in the Public Awareness Video category for its educational video, “It’s Not Waste If It’s Energy.”

The slick video, viewable below, sings the praises of waste to energy (WTE) in general and the Union County, N.J. WTE plant in particular, highlighting the benefits of the technology and its status as a renewable resource.

The MERCURY Awards, established in 1987 by MerCOMM Inc., recognize outstanding achievements in professional communications. Winners were chosen from 290+ categories and classifications, honoring “creativity, determination, functionality, originality, and smart thinking.”

Residents of Ghent, Belgium use an advanced radio-tag- (RFID) based pay-as-you-throw data collection system that purports to measure the city’s waste stream down to the pound. According to a post on Greenopolis, trash and organic waste carts fitted with special RFID tags, or “IntelliGhent” chips, make it possible to track each emptying of the bins. A device on collection vehicles reads customer data (name, address, type and size of container) on the chips. That information is then used to generate automatic bills each day. Recyclables go in blue plastic bags printed with specific instructions as to what is and isn’t accepted for recycling.

These and several other forward-thinking moves have helped the city’s diversion rate to skyrocket since 1995. That accomplishment is undercut somewhat by the revelation that the system has had a negligible effect on or possibly increased greenhouse gas emissions.

A recent piece in the New York Times details New York City’s pursuit of hybrid garbage trucks. The New York Sanitation Department (DSNY) is currently testing four different models provided by Mack and Crane Carrier. The city will take a year to decide which model it likes best, then purchase 300 trucks per year. According to the article, the large purchase could help lower the cost of heavy-duty hybrids.

The article predicts that 4,850 medium- and heavy-duty hybrid trucks will be on the road by next year, compared to 200 in 2006.

Is your firm or municipality considering the purchase of hybrid vehicles in the near future?