Track Your Trash
I have always been fascinated by trash. Not just literal trash but the systems and networks behind trash. Where does our trash go?
In New York City you live very close to trash. Growing up in suburbia, you dont interact much with trash. You put the bin on the road, and sometimes you drive past a garbage truck, but beyond that its minimal.
In New York City, trash is very up close and personal. Outside apartment buildings on any given day is a massive army of bagged trash, often taller than the people creeping along the sidewalk beside it, and also often twitching, as if it had a heartbeat, with a creature inside, enjoying the spoils of the city.
Rushali, Patrick and I began talking about these kinds of anecdotes when we started talking about trash. I had seen a garbage man dump both recycling bins and trash bins into the same truck somewhere near Red Hook — this disheartened my faith in the entire system and really made me question what happens in the government ruled world of trash collection.
We learned through data readily available through ny.gov sites that New Yorkers contribute over 52 tons of trash per day! I had to double check that statistic from reading it to typing it out just now because that seems like an astounding amount of trash.
We settled on the concept of visualizing your trash collection, or better understanding the systems and bureaucracy of our trash network. How do things like neighborhood factor in to the amount of trash produced? What are possible biases in trash data? What would it look like to see the amount of trash your neighbohood produces in a year piled up on the street to scale? How do you “scale” something like trash?
We split up to address these questions and came to a series of different conceptual avenues towards a common endgoal — how can we bring people closer to their trash, literally and metaphorically?
I imagined a VR environment that would allow you to somehow quantify and compare your trash to your neighbors, based off of a conceptual database of google maps type data of how much trash EACH household creates.
This is also partnered with a more “track your trash” style visualization that would physically allow you to embed sensors in your trash and view then through the entire route of the trash, with a literal garbage truck traversing the route from where you dropped the sensor to the landfill, connecting the user closer to the physical destination of their waste.
Patrick playfully imagined ways of visualizing the “tons” of weight that trash is usually measured in.
Thinking about ways to make the abstract and often astronomical sounding numbers you find when presented with trash data was fun and challenging, and I think settling on an informative and relatable way is the crux of this project.
