The Minus Frozen Garbage Container is a concept device designed to keep the sink down by holding your garbage at below-freezing temperatures. Sure, you could just empty the trash more frequently, but wouldn’t you rather spend a lot more money and use up a lot more energy? Of course you would. [Yanko Design via Ubergizmo]

The project both helps divert materials from landfills and gives the homeless a place to sleep (though I wonder how they breathe under all that plastic). Max won $US10,000, a Dell laptop and a trip to Boston. [Design Blog]

The All-In-One recycling centre has an 8-gallon bin for cans and bottles and a 5-gallon bin for newspaper and junkmail. There’s a foot-activated can crusher that automatically drops the compressed rubbish into the bin, and a carbon filter in the lid to contain odours. In addition, the front of the unit has an LCD screen which reminds you what day the recycling comes.

But the price? An overblown $US250 dollars. My inefficient and inadequate recycling habits will have to do for now. [Brookstone and Williams-Sonoma via Red Ferret via BB Gadgets]

The top can, which also contains a bag dispenser, is for disposable goods. The middle can is for packaging and the bottom is for recyclables like bottles. Foot pedals open up different parts of the can. Stepping on the left pedal opens the top can, the middle paddle revolves the central can outward, and the right pedal turns the bottom can towards the user.

Unfortunately, it’s just a concept for now. But I can’t imagine why some entrepreneurial trash can manufacturer wouldn’t pick it up in the near future. [Constance Guisset via The Design Blog]

The Chinese who attacked them were trying to keep mum on the lucrative business of mining e-waste for valuable components, including gold. According to Jim Puckett, who works for a group working to stop the dumping of toxic materials in third world countries, “A lot of people are turning a blind eye here. And if somebody makes enough noise, they’re afraid this [business] is all going to dry up.”

The workers who sift through these e-waste pits get paid about $US8 a day. They use caustic chemicals and often burn plastic without any type of protection uniform. The air is full of toxins, potable water needs to be trucked in, and pregnancies in the city are six times more likely to be miscarriages. All to deal with the mess we ship over. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that even though we don’t see our trash anymore, it still exists. And even though America has laws against e-dumping, companies regularly flout them with little repercussion.

Pelley’s investigation will be broadcast on CBS this Sunday at 7pm. [CBS News via China Digital Times]

Well, according to News.com.au, there’s now another technology we’re behind the rest of the world in: dealing with e-waste. Apparently we are “coming last” when it comes to recycling and reusing our old technology, and the government’s dragging its heels when it comes to coming up with any meaningful legislation to improve the situation.

Most disappointing though is that most of the western world still believes that dealing with e-waste is as simple as shipping old mobile phones and CRT TVs to third world countries – places like Delhi and Nigeria – so they can disassemble them. The problem is that they have no means for protection against all the toxic substances inside our gadgets, and when these substances are released, they generally end up poisoning someone or something.

Hit the link for the full article – it’s a cause for great concern for any real gadget fan in Australia.

[News.com.au]

A spy camera hidden in a black back beside a notorious UK “fly-tipping” (or illegal waste dumping in the King’s English) hot spot was recently thrown out by local workers with the other garbage. Apparently, this operation was so top secret that the workers in question did not need to know the details before being sent off to pick up the trash. To make matters worse, the camera has been valued at somewhere between US$14 and US$20,000. Basically, its just a hilarious waste of taxpayer money illustrated using equally hilarious British terminology. [Telegraph via Digg]

Randwick isn’t the only council using the technology – Ryde council introduced RFID tags on their bins back in 2006.

The trucks that collect the rubbish weigh the bins as they empty them, and then use the bin’s RFID chip to monitor the households waste and recycling quantities.

Despite fears that the councils will use this information to raise waste management fees and spy on residents, they claim that “bin weight data will help identify average bin weights by type
and suburb. This information will also be used to develop waste
education material.” They also say that only the councils themselves and their waste management contractor have access to the data.

Potentially, this is a great use for RFID technology if it results in increased recycling and less household waste. But is it possible for a government agency not to use all that detailed information for evil? We’ll just have to wait and see whether prices go up for waste management in these new tech-savvy councils.

[SMH]

About 50 percent of all trackable objects are due to in-orbit explosion events (about 200) or collision events (less than 10).

Yes, we knew that there was a lot of crap out there, but not to this extent. According to the ESA, this is really bad news and urgent measures are needed. Explosions in space are not disastrous on their own, but because of the aftermath. One example: a geostationary satellite travels at 6,213 miles per hour. If it explodes, all the debris stays near the orbit, forming a cloud around the Earth within a few days, as this simulation shows:

The ESA is urging to introduce measures to mitigate this problem, like the complete depletion of fuel in rocket stages (like some Delta launchers already do following NASA’s Procedural Requirements for Limiting Orbital Debris) or returning objects to Earth once their mission is complete (perhaps to destroy them on re-entry,) just like SES Americom is going to do with their brand-new AMC-14. This satellite failed to reach its projected altitude and now has to be splashed into the sea because of a dispute with Boeing, which won’t let SES Americom use their patented recovery method to put the satellite into the right geostationary orbit.

The impact of these measures could be huge, as reflected by this simulation of how things could look by the year 2112, with and without taking action:

While the idea of bringing back used stages and satellites back to Earth may seem too expensive, in the long run it’s clear that leaving all this trash up there is going to have huge consequences to the development of space exploration and colonisation. Those concepts may still seem science fiction for many, but as these simulations show, the current and future problem is very real, and could be extremely dangerous.

This is how it looks when orbital debris hits a spaceship, simulated in a laboratory.

[ESA Gallery, Space debris: assessing the risk, NASA, Wikipedia — via Space Travel and Slashdot]