Tag: Trash

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.

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.

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’m not a very huge fan of dustpans. Or brooms, for that matter. But both are essential if you want to keep your floors dirt, dust, and hair-free. Maybe it’s the way I sweep or how I hold the broom, but I’ve never been really good at getting all that dust and dirt into the pan after I’ve swept through the entire room.

Andrea Petrachi aka Himatic is the bizarro equivalent of that bad kid in the original Toy Story movie who enjoys torturing and destroying his toys. What Himatic does is create what he calls “cyber sculptures” out of discarded electronics, gadgets and toys.

It’s every geek’s nightmare: mistakenly putting your precious gadgets into a bag and accidentally having them thrown out! This happened to Eric Boehs and he managed to use MobileMe to track down his lost iPad and iPhone.

Just like everything else these days, the MS Windows trashcan has been re-born in 3D. But you don’t need special glasses to see this one. The guys at Codeco basically took the classic trash can icon from MS Windows and transformed it into a papercraft 3D model.

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.

And some people think junk is just, well, junk. But to the more visionary among us, that junk could be anything. Anything. Even a Tesla coil, if you’re innovative enough. This DIY Tesla coil was built entirely from items found in the garbage.

Here in Chicago, we just got started with a city-sponsored neighborhood recycling program. While they’ll collect and re-purpose much of your post-consumer waste, electronics aren’t on the pick-up list. But if you’re a gadget addict like me, you probably go through batteries like they’re going out of style.

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.