London officials planting tracking chips in trash bins
posted Feb 14th 2005 8:30AM
By now, the image of a dumpster-diving spy digging through someone's trash to get the, er, dirt they need to make
their case is something of a cliche. But a new twist may be ready to emerge, in which the trash-digging is automated,
and no one's refuse is safe from scrutiny. In an experiment designed to track trash collection, residents of Croydon,
South London, are having chips installed in their trash bins. Although the chips are currently set just to keep tabs on
collections, residents have already been told that authorities may be able to use them to monitor trash levels and warn
those who are deemed to be producing too much that they need to "manage their rubbish more effectively." No wonder
Andrew Pelling, who represents the area in the London assembly, is calling the chips the "spy in your bin."
[Via Near Near Future]
We've had these in south Nottingham for about a year now. I'm not sure that they do any good except scare people into recycling. (Well, it worked for me.)
People will start dumping their garbage into someone else's bin.
i live in croydon and have heard nothing about this
There's actually a lot less to this then the story suggests. Having just watched a news report on it, it seems that households will have a barcode sticker on their bins and recycling crates, which is scanned by the rubbish collection men at point of collection.
So it doesn't so much register how much rubbish you produce, just that you actually do produce some rubbish. Croydon council have already publicly stated that they are not monitoring individual household's waste levels (in fact with this system, they can't), but that they want to ascertain how much of the waste produced by the borough is not recycled.
This is already in place in some areas in Ireland, where you are charged according to the weight of the rubbish you put out for collection. The collection truck has scales built into the hoist to weigh each bin. This data is then tied to the RFID chip in the bin and your bill calculated accordingly.
As well as people dumping rubbish in other people's bins this is also encouraging people to just dump their rubbish by the side of the road. As a system it is more fair but it is open to abuse at a number of levels.
Here in the US, alot of companies taht do the local garbage collection as well as Cities that do the collection themselves have been doing the recycling for you. They have a system worked out to help automatically sort the recyclable or something. For all I know, it may be some city work doing it. I DO know they do this where I live. They don't keep tabs on how much you throw out either. The NIMBY folks in our town though refuse to let us go back to doing trash to steam electric plants. They are too afraid of them blowing up like one did towards the end of the 1990's.
At least now with this chip you can track down the pikey who stole your bin.
http://www.virtuapikey.com
we have this already some years in Ghent (Belgium) where you pay per time they empty the trash. This system is linked to a system of different trash bin for different sorts of waste. The aim was to reduce the volume of waste that can not be recycled and this worked very well.