New Yorkers have a history of experimenting with pneumatic tubes—both for mail delivery (seen above) and public transit
If you happen to be walking around the northern tip of Manhattan these days, you’ll see a strange sphere floating in the water near the Inwood Hill Park. From afar, it looks like a geodesic dome stitched together from thin slivers of metal, but inching closer, you’ll notice something startling. It’s made of trash.
Who likes taking out the trash? Nobody, that’s who. We’ll do anything we can to avoid trips to the curb, or the garbage chute, including letting it pile up for weeks on end. But a giant mountain of stinking trash in your kitchen isn’t the only solution. This stainless steel trash can includes a manual compressor letting you squeeze roughly twice the amount of trash into its 10 gallon capacity.
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.
Helping you connect with that someone is Trashswag.
Trashswag is an web-based app that turns collecting and recycling trash into a social activity. The Toronto-based app lets users report stuff that they’re throwing out or have seen in the streets that have been thrown out by their neighbors. Users can snap pictures of the stuff they’ve seen so that others can gauge if they’re worth picking up or recycling.
There are also a bunch of categories on the app like like furniture, wood/lumber/timber, building materials, architectural salvage or garage/yard sale to make browsing easier.
There’s no word on if or when Trashswag will come to other cities, but if you’re looking for junk on the streets of Toronto, check it out here.
[via Pop Up City]
Sometimes you’ve just got to make do with what you’ve got, but that doesn’t mean you have to want for things, things like musical instruments. The upcoming documentary Landfill Harmonic (a totally righteous pun, I feel obligated to note) is about a slum in Cateura, Paraguay that still has an orchestra, and orchestra with instruments made of trash. More »
UK engineers developing harpoon that could help space junk meet a fiery end
Posted in: Today's ChiliSure, we can pull space junk out of orbit with lasers or use it to cobble together new satellites, but if engineers at space firm Astrium UK have their way, space trash could be disposed of with the help of harpoons. Currently in a conceptual stage, the system is designed to shoot defunct satellites or other debris with a harpoon mounted on a “chaser satellite” and use a tethered propulsion pack to send the rubbish in an atmospheric descent where it’ll burn up. Since the projectile could shoot straight through targets and result in even more garbage, it’s been fashioned with a crushable portion to reduce its speed upon impact. There’s no concrete word on when the outfit’s solution might be put in action, but they’ll present their work on Wednesday at the 63rd International Astronautical Congress in Naples (Italy, not Florida, mind you). If you can’t wait to see the harpoon at work, head past the break to catch tests of an Earth-based prototype.
Continue reading UK engineers developing harpoon that could help space junk meet a fiery end
UK engineers developing harpoon that could help space junk meet a fiery end originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Oct 2012 05:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Gassy outbursts from a suborbital rocket may be the cleanest way to get rid of hazardous space debris, suggests a new US patent application filed on 27 September by aerospace giant Boeing of Chicago. More »
The Netherlands is rolling out some 6,000 smart garbage cans that can only be used when residents scan an RFID-enabled ID card. Besides monitoring just how much trash someone disposes of, the cans will also measure and charge the user based on how much refuse they tossed. More »
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.
The lid of each bin actually has a molded sample of what you’re supposed to throw in them. Of course, it would help if they still had their labels (or were actually made out of glass, paper and metal,) so the lids would only serve as an additional guide to help out trash throwers who aren’t sure which bin their garbage is supposed to go in.
The GO Recycle bin was designed by GOODSSPASSION, who “intends to revolutionize the recycling industry and make it consumer-friendly” as “the idea of the GO bin is [to] make recycling fun and convenient.”
[via Yanko Design]