Archinect - News

This garbage can drives itself to your curb

2019-10-02T19:00:00-04:00

...the SmartCan is one of those rare home-focused robots that could...actually deliver some genuinely useful functionality...Using a companion app, the SmartCan will follow a pre-programmed schedule and automatically drive itself to a curbside drop off point on garbage pickup days, and then autonomously return to wherever you keep them parked the rest of the week

While the SmartCan may prove a pragmatic solution for some homeowners, there are still questions of price, which have yet to be revealed, and maintenance, such as charging, risked damage, and owners remembering to keep paths clear, reports Gizmodo.

Tracing New York's waste management

2016-10-27T13:27:00-04:00

Each day, New York’s public garbage trucks collect nearly 7,000 tonnes of residential mixed solid waste. After finishing their routes, most of these trucks will deposit the garbage in one of New York’s waste transfer stations located throughout the city. From there, the garbage will eventually be loaded on to a barge or train and carried as far as 600 miles to its final stop. For most of New York’s mixed solid waste (about 80% of it by tonnage), this last stop will be a landfill.

"The remaining 20% will end up at a waste-to-energy plant, where it will be incinerated and converted into energy."

For more on the infrastructure of waste, follow these links:

Hyperloop, but for New York City's trash

2016-02-04T13:43:00-05:00

[A former sanitation policy director for New York City, Ben] Miller is working with his partners at the planning firm Closed Loops, with funding from state grants, to bring pneumatic tubes to New York’s High Line. Rather than rotting in landfills, carrot peels and apple cores from nearby restaurants could travel under the feet of unsuspecting tourists through pneumatic tubes hung below the elevated park. A small facility could turn them into compost right there in the neighborhood.

More on garbage disruption and the very pressing problem of waste management worldwide:

The Uber of waste management is coming for your trash

2015-07-07T17:38:00-04:00

Unlike Waste Management and other garbage giants, Rubicon doesn’t operate its own trucks or own any landfills. Instead, it runs a tech platform that connects small, local haulers with major companies that want to cut down on their garbage costs and increase their recycling efforts.

Rubicon Global, which previously helped Fortune 500 companies save money with their own garbage management, is now bringing their services to the regular folks. The app for on-demand waste pick-up was largely devised by Uber's founding CTO, Oscar Salazar, who is now working as Rubicon's CTO. Pent-up demand for "disrupting" the waste management system seems, naturally, pretty high, and Rubicon's co-founder / CEO Nate Morris seems assured of the app's success: “We know from the past that when technology competes against brick-and-mortar assets, technology wins every time.”

Transforming a garbage heap into a public park

2015-07-02T17:37:00-04:00

Since the capping and closure of Fresh Kills’ five mounds, this 2,200-acre expanse of wetlands, marshlands, dry lowlands, forests, and grasslands has evolved into an unusual combination of natural and engineered beauty.

Originally a patch of creeks and marshland on the western shore of Staten Island, the area now known as Fresh Kills became a major landfill for New York City in 1948, once Robert Moses bought the land for housing development. His plan was to solidify the marshland with waste for a few years, and then build. But construction never happened, and for the remainder of the 20th century, the area served as a 2,200-acre garbage heap (by comparison, Central Park covers 843 acres). People hated it, and in 2001 managed to get the city to close it down, and begin the process of transforming it back into its (more or less) former ecological state, to be used as a public park known as Freshkills.

Learn more about Freshkills' storied past:

Of Dirt and Cleanliness – (Clean India Campaign)

2014-10-07T12:00:00-04:00

"In all modern cultures, cleaning up merely involves moving “dirt” from one place to another. Five decades ago, cleaning up may have been easier. It would have meant restoring the predominantly organic and compostable discards in the waste stream to its rightful place – namely, the soil – and facilitating its transformation into manure. Over the past two decades, India has transformed from a sleepy nation living in its villages to an economic powerhouse with an urban population bursting at its seams. We can, as Modi did in the UN General Assembly, invoke our ancient culture to claim that Indians have a special relationship with and reverence for nature. But that does not take away from the fact that Indians or Americans, Hindus or Muslims, we are all worshippers of the same homogenising religion of consumerism. We are what our garbage is. Our garbage which once bore no resemblance to American garbage is increasingly peppered with the same brand names, the same indestructible materi...

The Canadian Company Drowning in Phnom Penh’s Garbage

2014-06-09T13:22:00-04:00

In 2002, CINTRI, a branch of Canadian firm Cintec Environment Inc., was granted an exclusive 50-year contract to collect commercial and residential waste in Phnom Penh and keep the city’s main streets clean. The exact details of the company’s agreement with city hall have never been made public, but since the deal was inked, Phnom Penh’s population has swelled from just over one million to two million people. The population boom and its attendant urban sprawl seem to have caught CINTRI off-guard

Consider the dumpster...

2014-02-25T13:38:00-05:00

The long and varied history of waste and its removal in New York from the 18th century onwards is the subject of Elizabeth Royte’s 2005 book Garbage Land and of the Urban Omnibus City of Systems video she narrates. In the video, Royte describes how her research into where exactly her trash was going after she threw it out has led her to become a more ecological citizen, with “a systems view” of our interconnected processes of manufacturing, transportation, disposal and re-use.

Plan to build UK's first building entirely out of waste

2012-10-04T19:04:00-04:00

Designed by Brighton-based architect Duncan Baker-Brown, it will be built on the University of Brighton's campus in the city centre from waste and surplus material from local building sites and other local industries. The walls will be made of waste timber products. Ply "cassettes" containing waste material will be slotted in between the timber structure. These cassettes will be removable so that new building technologies can be added easily.

From Trash to Beauty and Back Again

2011-10-27T19:53:54-04:00

a floating dome, built with the spokes of dead umbrellas and carried over the waves by the invisible power of empty soda bottles.... was due to begin a monthlong exhibit on Friday in a finger of water in Inwood, at the northern end of Manhattan. “We were floating it on pontoons to Inwood from the South Bronx.” A pause. “We shipwrecked,” she said. “On Rikers Island.” If this is failure, it is of a type rooted in genius.