Tag: Garbage

Litter sucks. It makes cities look ugly, and can be a public health hazard. Sometimes bins overflow, sometimes they’re hard to find, and sometimes people just don’t care what they do with their trash. Whatever the reason, litter sucks.

Volvo is working on a slick autonomous vehicle project with a Swedish refuse company that is aiming to automate the task of picking up your trash and taking it to the truck for dumping. The process needs a human driver for the truck (for now) and otherwise the process of picking up the can, schlepping it to the truck, and dumping it is automated.

Claptrap is kind of annoying. Cute, but annoying. The robot from Borderlands has a grating voice, he follows you everywhere, and spends way too much time beatboxing. I complain, but the game wouldn’t be the same without him.

You know that table top and dresser you’ve been meaning to throw out for the past couple of years now? Someone could actually use that. And those old clocks and broken chairs? Someone out there is willing to take them off your hands and fix it or salvage it for parts.

There is a lot of garbage in the world, which is probably why Coca-Cola and will.i.am partnered up to create EKOCYCLE, an initiative that helps market gadgets, clothing and other products which use up to 100% plastic and aluminum waste as source material.

Oh, how I love wacky Japanese gadgets. And how I hate cleaning. So when Francesco over at Hobby Media[IT] tipped me off to these Japanese cleaning robots, I was just about in heaven.

If people still can’t get it right after you’ve color coded and labeled your trash cans to death, then what’s a designer supposed to do? Come up with an even better trash can in the form of GO Recycle.

I try to avoid driving on roads which still show evidence of some wild party that probably went on the night before: discarded plastic bags, crushed plastic cups, and shards of glass from broken bottles all around.

I hate taking out the trash. I like to wait until the bag in the can is so crushed down that getting the bag out in one piece is an impossibility. Then I can just dump the can in the big can outside and then the trash guys mess with the thing.

Designed by Haneum Lee, the Gaon street light/wastebasket concept composts biodegradable waste and uses the methane by-product to power its light, saving energy and eliminating waste while lighting the streets. It’s a bright idea – or is it?

Co-funded by the European Commission, the $3.9 million (USD) Dustbot project aims to build a moderately-sized robot to navigate the narrow streets that garbage trucks can’t reach. Hey that rhymed! Nice. Anyway the pictures below were taken from Dustbot’s trial run in Peccioli, Italy.

These most excellent bookends are the perfect addition to any Star Wars geek’s bookshelf. Inspired by the famous garbage compactor scene from Episode IV: A New Hope, these limited-edition hand-painted bookends flip that classic movie moment inside-out.

Talk about making something from nothing: a sewage plant in Japan’s Nagano prefecture recently began mining gold from wastewater. The sewage plant is located in the town of Suwa, where there are “numerous precision machining companies, metal plating facilities and hot springs”, which account for the relatively high concentration of gold in the wastewater that is processed at the plant.

I love my PS3, and I love a good game of Tetris, but unlike Oscar the Grouch, I don’t know if I can say that I love trash. Still, this offbeat new game in the works combines all three into a single, juicy delicious morsel of gaming that could be the most addictive garbage collection game this side of Katamari Damacy.