Some trash is recycled, some is thrown away, some ends up where it shouldn't end up.

When you have all these traces of trash moving around, you can ask yourself how can we make the system more efficient. Then we can make better decisions. And perhaps we will not throw away the plastic bottles that go every day to the dump.

The plastic bottle we're throwing away every day still stays there. And if we show that to people, then we can also promote some behavioral change.

The deployment of geolocating tags attached to ordinary garbage could paint a surprising picture of the waste management system, as trash is shipped throughout the country in a maze-like disposal process - as we saw in Seattle with our own Trash Track project.

We have this condition where digital technology is becoming increasingly smaller and distributed in the environment. In a certain sense, this is the first time ever we can describe a city in real time.

If someone can use it, then why throw it away? I don't like to see anything thrown in the trash that someone else could use.