“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

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

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!

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.

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

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

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

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?