TRASH TALK

You pay for every kilowatt of energy, every gallon of water and every therm of natural gas you use in your home every month. You feel the pain when you leave the lights on, take extra hot showers, or forget to fix a leak when your bill spikes as a result of your excesses. Even the people who claim to not care about sustainability feel the financial pressure to reduce their energy and water use. So why don’t we treat trash, recycling and compost waste the same way? If we want people to reduce their waste, we need to bring awareness and financial incentives and consequences, to our waste disposal system. We can no longer rely on the “toss it and forget it” model we are using today. According to the The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, plastics amount to 13 percent of the municipal waste stream and unfortunately, only about 9 percent of plastics are recycled. The EPA also estimates that each American throws away 1.3 pounds of food waste every day and that these compostable items, along with yard waste, make up 20 to 30 percent of the U.S. waste stream! For a typical resident, there is no real incentive to properly sort trash, recycling and compost because the user pays the same every month no matter how full or empty each bin may be. We know that the first step in any change in behavior is empowering the user with knowledge. Our prototype, TRASH TALK, is a “smart waste receptacle” that provides instant feedback to its user regarding the amount and type of waste the user has most recently deposited in the receptacle as well as cumulative data over time, through an on bin weight display and through an app. We also know that information is only the first step and that really behavioral change results from incentives and consequences. The information collected by the TRASH TALK trash can will be used by the municipal waste collection service in a “cap and scale” type system to calculate the monthly bill so that behavioral changes in purchasing and disposal has a real financial impact on the user and can work towards San Francisco’s goal of zero landfill contributions by 2020. We see our plan rolling out in a series of stages, beginning as a pilot program working in close concert with the local municipality. A few neighborhoods would be selected to pilot the program and given the option to lower their monthly waste bill by reducing their waste production with the TRASH TALK cans. Garbage would incur the highest fee per pound by a significant margin, with recycling for a much lower fee per pound, and compost for a nominal fee per pound. Eventually the full program could be rolled out to correspond with a rate hike for customers who opt out of the TRASH TALK program and subsidized trash cans available to those who wish to participate. Over time, we anticipate that a more active engagement with waste will result in changes in the consumption habits of users, who will begin to demand compostable and recyclable packaging, or better yet, solutions that involve no packaging at all