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Smart Trash Carts Tell If You Haven't Been Recycling
Starting next year Cleveland residents face paying a $100 fine if they don't recycle, and the city's new high-tech trash cans will keep track if they don't. The new cans are embedded with radio frequency identification chips and bar codes which keep track of how often residents take them to the curb. If the chip shows you haven't brought your recycle can out in a while, a lucky trash supervisor will go through your can looking for recyclables. From the article: "Trash carts containing more than 10 percent recyclable material could lead to a $100 fine, according to Waste Collection Commissioner Ronnie Owens. Recyclables include glass, metal cans, plastic bottles, paper and cardboard."
RFID is currently used to identify the owners of waste bins and therefore allows weight quotas and mandatory recycling to be enforced. However, RFID on all clothes, food and luxury items is imminent. Therefore the current RFID monitoring infrastructure could very soon be used to enforce healthy eating, tax collection and a myriad of miscellaneous purposes yet to be devised. Like many technological measures, it rides roughshod over the presumption of innocence before proven guilty by logging everything upfront.
Unlike barcodes, RFID identifies individual items uniquely. Therefore, it becomes possible to identify that, for example, a piece of underwear in today's refuse was the same piece of underwear worn five months ago at a civil protest.
Even the initial use of using RFID to enforce mandatory recycling is misguided. I recycle but consuming less is far more effective. When recycling schemes are introduced, materials are scarce and valuable. However, an efficient recycling scheme can only lower the value of materials. When the price becomes too low, it is not economic to sort the material. The solution is to export the material to less developed economies with less regulation. In the worst case, illiterate 10 year old girls lead short and stunted lives after sifting medical waste and getting repeated exposure to fatal diseases. Therefore, efficient recycling schemes trap families in a cycle of poverty.
Domestic incineration plants don't help. They serve to magnify the capacity of landfill and therefore they lower the disposal cost of unnecessary products. This encourages rampant consumerism. Incineration plants provide unrewarding labor and therefore they depress wages. The energy recovered is also quite low compared to the pollution produced. So, incineration plants to recover energy from waste are counter-productive.
If you want to make world a better place, consume less.
Because, of course, having an agent of the government knock on your door and demanding to look through your trash is the "right thing to do".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yeah! Stick it to that evil minimum-wage worker hired to sort through the recycles, who has no influence on the laws or on this program whatsoever. That'll show 'em!
Why? You're giving it to them already, aren't you?
If you're concerned about privacy, buy a shredder.
If the though of the e-e-evil city gub'mint having your trash bothers you, dispose of it yourself.
I'm fairly sure that an unrestricted anonymous waste disposal service wasn't guaranteed in the constitution.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I wonder how long before Cleveland just sends in SWAT on a daily basis to search for recyclables, and if you are found to have some not currently in the bin, they summarily execute you, sell your organs on the black market, and bill your family for the bullet? Only a matter of time!
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
>>a good summary page is here: http://www.uos.harvard.edu/fmo/recycling/myths.shtml
This is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read from Harvard. And I've read a lot of ridiculous things.
For example:
"Excuse: Recycling costs too much.
* Recycling generates revenue to help pay for itself, while incineration and landfilling do not."
Notice the complete lack of connection between 'excuse' and explanation? If recycling cost 10x as much as landfilling, but only paid back a fraction of a percent, they would make the same excuse, and be just as right. It doesn't address the core issue at all.
Or even better:
"Excuse: There is no landfill crisis.
landfill
* Recycling's true value comes from preventing pollution and saving natural resources and energy, not landfill space."
So in other words, we know that there's no crisis, but look at the monkey. Look at the silly monkey!
" * Recycling is largely responsible for averting the landfill crisis."
Not in the slightest.
" * Most states have less than twenty years of landfill capacity: who wants to live next to a new landfill?"
Deceptive; this makes it sound like we'll be out of landfill space in 20 years. Just like we were in 1980.
So on and so forth. I can't believe you're helping spread such bullshit.
No, trash is considered legally abandoned. Thus, you have no rights to it. Using a gun to enforce your own illegal views, brilliant. Go use that gun and remove yourself from the population, please. There's a difference between your car and a trash can.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
The difference is that a gun - or a sword, or a knife, or any other weapon - is designed to change the balance of power in a fight.
Really. I bet you I could disarm your pussy assed self, take your gun and shoot you with it. Moron.
If you outlaw guns (or swords, or knives), then the vast majority of the population becomes UNARMED. This makes it that much easier for an armed criminal - already a scofflaw - to commit crimes.
the facts are that the US has a vastly higher crime rate than similar countries that have restrictive gun laws. Take your rhetoric and blow it out your ass.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Weyrhauser is a major player in Washington state politics. Which may explain why they get to destroy hundreds of thousands of acres of national forest land.
Did you miss the part where I said Pacific Northwest? Lodgepole Pines, Pacific Silver Fir, and the other assorted pines are soft-woods valued for their pulp and used for paper.
It would be nice if all paper was from private land farming, but I know different. It may be a reneweABLE resource, it doesn't mean it is produced as such.
THL phish sticks