A team of researchers at MIT’s Senseable City Lab recently launched a project called Trash Track.  The team is electronically tagging different pieces of waste in order to track the journey of trash through the disposal systems of New York City and Seattle.  The goal of this brilliant project is to educate people about what happens to the everyday trash we throw away and what impact that garbage has on the environment.

The goals of this project are similar to movements gaining a fair bit of traction right now surrounding corporate and producer sustainability and the Cradle-to-Cradle concept.  In the 2002 book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, authors McDonough and Braungart call for a new industrial revolution,  one that revolutionizes our traditional manufacturing processes and eliminates the concept of waste altogether.    The Cradle-to-Cradle model teaches that we must design products with the end in mind so that they can be re-used or reconstituted into useful products down the road.  For example, that coffee cup you dumped in the trash can this morning would, in a Cradle-to-Cradle world, be made of “eco-effective” materials that can be tossed in the ground and provide nutrients for the soil, instead of being made of plastic and following the traditional pathways through the garbage disposal system that the MIT researchers are tracking.  Both projects point out the challenges and opportunities we face as we seek long-term new solutions to how we manage what we throw away.

The Trash Track project, the Cradle to Cradle movement, and the recent announcement by Wal-Mart to develop a “sustainable index” for everything sold on their shelves, all highlight an important shift in thought concerning waste.  Instead of buying and using products once and never thinking about them again after their primary usefulness is over, we all need to embrace this notion that waste is a resource that must be redirected toward reuse and repurposing, rather than being buried in the local landfill.