There is no Planet B

«WHY DO WE KNOW SO MUCH ABOUT HOW SUPPLY CHAINS WORK IN OUR CITIES, BUT QUESTION SO LITTLE ABOUT THE ‘REMOVAL CHAIN'?»

Senseable City Lab, MIT
Trash Track Project

There are more than 7 billion people in the world.
3 billion reside in urban areas and produce 1.3 billion tonnes of solid waste each year.
By 2025, waste production will rise to 2.2 billion tonnes per year.
Images of landfills visualise new landscapes created by the accumulation of waste. Mountains criss-crossed by men, women and children who pass through them daily and work within them.
What if this activity was instead in the hands of robots instructed by humans?
Borrowing one of the main slogans of the contemporary environmental movement, initiated by the very young Greta Thumberg, we propose an activity suitable even for very young children that supports them in building a civic and environmental culture.
On a carpet resembling a street, certified wooden reproductions of different types of waste are scattered: paper packages, plastic bottles, glass bottles, aluminium containers. Participants will have to guide, through the use of a tablet, a chameleon-like robot with a luminous heart, which, like a modern rubbish collector, will retrieve the waste to be sorted in the right way.