Students from Redmond High School and Issaquah Middle School joined researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Trash Track, an international project tracking waste through the disposal system.

Researchers from the MIT SENSEable City Lab visited both schools yesterday, bringing with them dozens of custom-designed electronic tags. The students provided an array of items intended for disposal, among them pop bottles, silver track shoes, milk cartons and a broken skateboard. Students and researchers worked to carefully affix the tags to the materials destined for disposal.

The goal of the project is to encourage people to think about what they throw away and how it impacts the environment. The students said they appreciate the value of the hands-on project. “You can read it in a book, but you are never going to actually learn it like when you do it in the field,” said Redmond High junior Tyler Black.

Tyler’s teacher, Mike Town, praised the opportunity to work with MIT and Waste Management on the project. He said his science students are already engaged in large scale, school-wide effort to measure the carbon footprint of many of the things that come into the school.

“Now we will be able to track the CO2 that goes into transportation of all this stuff out of school. It’s the perfect project for them,” said Town.

In mid-July, 2009, the Trash Track team began a deployment of 3,000 smart tags on waste objects in New York, Seattle, and London. Working with Waste Management, Inc. they are monitoring the path of the trash in real-time using the tags, which report location data to a central server at MIT, where it is processed and visualized into dynamic maps showing a slice of the city’s waste stream. The students could immediately begin tracking the movements of their trash online.

Waste Management community education director Rita Smith provided details about the extensive recycling, composting and waste disposal system in the northwest and then encouraged the students to look at the big picture.

“It’s important for all of us to understand the complexity of recycling and disposing of waste; this project has the potential to help us all “rethink” what we consume and the waste it produces,” said Smith.

The project has been developed in partnership with Waste Management Inc., Qualcomm, the Architecture League of New York, the City of Seattle, and the Seattle Public Library.

For more information on the project, see: http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack or www.thinkgreen.com.