Trash | Track from MIT's Senseable City Lab from: http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack/
On the eve of the start of our annual high consumption season (and subsequent high waste), this video from Senseable City Lab at MIT shows how trash travels within the United States. Five hundred people in Seattle put GPS tracking devices in 3,000 pieces of trash, and the trash was tracked over time to see where it all ended up, and how long it took to get there. Watch the YouTube video and also check out the visualization on the Senseable City Lab website. Thanks, Tom Paino, for pointing out the link to me. I also love that the video starts out with a quote from one of my all-time favorite authors/books, Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities:
“Nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of refuse.
Outside the city, surely; but each year the city expands,
and the street cleaners have to fall farther back.
The bulk of the outflow increases and the piles rise higher,
become stratified, extend over a wider perimeter.”
By the way, this visualization project won an award in the NSF (National Science Foundation) annual competition – International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. Check out some of the other winners at: http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/scivis/winners_2010.jsp
