Depending on how enthusiastically you rang in the New Year, you likely spent the first morning of 2010 enjoying the annual spectacle that is the Tournament of Roses Parade. But it’s after the 750,000 spectators clear out and the television cameras switch off that the real show begins: the cleanup.

“I think it’s become a tradition [for spectators] to leave their trash behind. It’s kind of like movie-theater syndrome,” Ann Erdman, spokeswoman for the city of Pasadena, Calif., told the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

The 70-person Pasadena Department of Public Works is tasked with collecting the 65 to 75 tons of trash left along the 5.5-mile parade route. According to the Tribune, crews start at either end of the route, removing large items that might impede foot or car traffic. From 10:30 p.m. New Year’s Day to 7:30 a.m., Jan. 2, the remaining debris is swept into the street and scooped up for collection before street sweepers make a final pass. Given the tremendous volume of trash that must be cleared in a short amount of time, none of the material is recycled.

Still, it’s better than cleaning up after the elephants.

Source: San Gabriel Valley Tribune

Following this year’s Super Bowl on Sunday, Feb. 7, CBS will premiere a new program called “Undercover Boss.” According to The Hollywood Reporter (THR), the new reality show follows corporate executives who anonymously take entry-level positions with their own companies, ostensibly to see how the other half lives. Hilarity and carefully edited personal growth no doubt ensue.

What makes “Undercover Boss” pertinent to this blog, however, is that the post-Super Bowl premiere features Waste Management president and COO Larry O’Donnell mixing with the hoi polloi. The show will follow Anderson “as he cleans porta-potties and works at a recycling plant,” says THR.

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?

The whiz-bang idea of a plasma-powered rocket is undercut somewhat when said rocket is relegated to collecting space garbage, but that is one of the many menial tasks Costa Rican-born physicist Franklin Chang Diaz envisions for his invention. The variable specific impulse magnetoplasmic rocket (VASIMR) is propelled by superheated exhaust gas and can move a craft much faster than current rocket technology at roughly half the cost. Chang Diaz, a former NASA astronaut now serving as president and CEO of the Ad Astra Rocket Company, says VASIMR may one day ferry astronauts to Mars and beyond. But for the time being, the craft could take on humbler jobs, such as keeping space stations aloft, ferrying payloads into orbit and, yes, collecting dead satellites and other potentially dangerous trash orbiting the planet.

“Our goal is to be able to have a garbage truck that will be picking up all of these objects at various orbits, obviously for a price,” Chang Diaz told GlobalPost. The trash could be dumped in an “orbital graveyard,” he added, “or we could actually launch them to the sun and drive them to the sun, which is kind of the ultimate, cosmic dump.”

Which sounds like a great metaphor until you realize that no one really worries about their local landfill going supernova.

Source: GlobalPost

So you redecorated the entire house, from the Asian-inspired living room to the country French kitchen. But something’s still not right. Why, it’s the garbage can liner, of course! You barely ever see it, but just knowing that that sad white plastic bag with the yellow ties fails to conform to your overall aesthetic just gnaws at you.

Fret not! Obsessives can now swath their trash in style thanks to Elaine Murray of Park City, Utah, inventor of decorated garbage liners sold under the name Sweet Baguettes. The liners currently come in three designs: a contemporary blue and brown pattern and two patterns suitable for a child’s trash can, cars and trucks and fairy princesses. More designs are planned as the product receives wider distribution. The four-gallon bags come in packs of 15, tastefully wrapped in baguette paper.

Therapy costs extra.

Source: The Park Record

We are days, nay, hours away from the annual American bacchanalia that is Thanksgiving. A day later, hordes of rampaging consumers will storm the nation’s retail outlets in a valiant attempt to stave off another year of depressing sales numbers.

Just in time, Greenopolis provides tips for an Earth- (if not turkey) friendly Thanksgiving and a green Black Friday.

The Atlanta-based Coca-Cola company has unveiled a new container technology it calls PlantBottle — a fully recyclable PET plastic bottle containing up to 30 percent organic material. Specifically, the organic material being used in the initial run of bottles is a byproduct of sugar cane processing, though it seems other organic material could also be used. Coke is pitching the new containers as beneficial to the environment (its production requires a smaller carbon footprint) and a means of reducing petroleum dependency.

According to a Coke press release, the amount of organic material that can be used in the production of new bottles must be adjusted depending on how much recycled PET is also being used. “For example,” it says, “Denmark uses recycled content in its PlantBottle packaging. The combined plant-based and recycled content makes up 65 percent of the material, with 50 percent coming from recycled material and 15 percent from plant-based material.”

The ability to recycle PlantBottle alongside regular old PET certainly would seem to give it an advantage over Polylactic acid (PLA) and other environmentally friendly plastic alternatives. But it may take time to fully grasp any potential downsides of the technology.

Thoughts?

You bought that big, beautiful pumpkin before Halloween with hopes that it would make it through Thanksgiving — double-duty decorating, if you will. But after an early frost, it’s looking alarmingly deflated and you’re left with the dilemma of how best to dispose of the thing. Of course, as industry types, we know composting is the best option. The Daily Green provides some simple tips for effectively composting a pumpkin. Baseball bats are involved.

There was no shortage of trash talk exchanged between New York and Philadelphia during the recently concluded 2009 World Series (congratulations, Yankees … AGAIN). But that’s not the only trash traveling between the two cities.

This week, the New York Times featured a well-written story about New York’s mutually beneficial waste exporting relationship, in which it pays other municipalities — including the Pennsylvania communities of Morrisville, Tullytown and Falls Township — to accept its refuse. Rather than resent the constant stream of trash from New Yorkers, residents of these Phillies-loving towns reap rich financial benefits. They even exhibit pride in their modern landfills, a far cry from New York’s maligned Fresh Kills landfill, the closing of which necessitated this arrangement in the first place.

Interesting read.