US researchers are hoping to eventually use smart dust technology to track household rubbish and e-waste.
At the moment the smallest tracking device is a tag, about the size of a business card. These electronic tags are being developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) SENSEable City lab.
The trash tags were recently placed on different types of household waste from thousands of homes in Seattle and New York. The tags used wireless technology to track the path of the rubbish from households to landfill, waste processing centres or wherever the signal stops.
The main purpose of the research was to make people aware of what happens to household rubbish.
It was undertaken with help from the City of Seattle, New York City Council, wireless technology company Qualcomm, America’s largest waste company Waste Management Inc. and a team of artists from the Architectural League of New York.
The battery powered trash tag works usd GPS and CDMA cellular phone technology. The tag’s position was then traced by measuring the strength of signals from mobile phone towers to a receptor on the tag.
The tags last for about two months and can go into a regular “sleep” mode which extends the battery life. This sleep mode is switched on by motion detectors which sense when the rubbish is not moving. Once the rubbish starts moving again the motion sensor restarts the tag so the rubbish can be traced.
The Trash Track project was featured in Toward the Sentient City, an exhibition organized by the Architectural League of New York.
The tags were placed on paper cups, plastic bottles, light globes, electronic waste and glass rubbish.
SENSEable City Lab team advisor Team advisor Stephen Miles told Wotwaste the tags could not be placed on everything.
“Objects that were smaller than our tags and organic compost (could not be tagged)”.
“We did not want to contaminate the compost with electronic devices,” Miles explained.
MIT sought to further reduce e-waste by using materials which could be legally mixed up with normal household waste.
The Trash Track tags proved to be very sturdy and remained with rubbish objects until the waste disappeared into landfill or was destroyed by shredders, heat, moisture or mechanical processing. They were also able to withstand the pressure of truck compacting.
“We used a very stable insulation foam making it almost impossible to separate the tags from the objects without destroying them both,” Miles said.
New York aims to have all of its waste recycled and diverted from landfill by 2030. Currently about 30 percent of its waste is recycled.
The Toward the Sentient City exhibition aimed to promote public interest in waste disposal and help encourage co-operation in responsible recycling.
Miles said MIT’s SENSEable Lab was hoping the research could be further refined. This meant investigating whether the sensors and receptors could be reduced to dust-sized devices, or smart dust technology.
“(Currently we are) limited by the size of our sensors.”
“(So it’s) not actually what I would describe as smart dust. But with smaller and cheaper tags we are getting there,” Miles said.
http://www.sentientcity.net/exhibit/