One purpose of the project, said Carlo Ratti, director of the lab, is to give people a concrete sense of their impact on the environment in a way that might lead them to change their habits."If you see where a plastic bottle ends up, a few miles down the road in a dump, you may want to get tap water or some other container for the water," Mr. Ratti said.
Collecting, transporting, storing and getting rid of garbage is a costly and often daunting task for cities... "From a logistics standpoint, it's a very complicated situation," Ms. Brown said.
"When you look at how waste is handled in different cities, it's like snowflakes. It's all different."
Other factors are also in play in the travel of recyclables like metal and plastic. Among them are price fluctuations that may make it cheaper for a company to ditch items than to recycle them, contamination that makes a can or paper useless, and human error in sorting or transporting material.
Does it all end up shredded and shipped to China, where who knows what happens to it?"
In New York... a recyclable plastic bottle picked up at Madison Avenue and 51st Street traveled 18.3 miles over four days to Kearny, N.J., and is still en route
Ultimately, she said, "we're looking for ways to recycle more and to do it all more efficiently."
Landsberg- "If I found out that it wasn't going where I think it does, if it is less recycled than I hoped," she said she "might think about buying less of it or doing without." "Maybe it is more about the reduce than the re-use,"
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