here is a picture of a very cool municipal waste bin design i’ve seen popping up all around parks and streets in nyc, does anybody know who designed this ?
Sorry I don’t have any info on the designer for ya.
But I would be very interested to know how well they work. There seems to be no indicators on them for what goes in each, except for a few labels. In my experience most people in the US don’t like to read much, and are they even bi or trilingual for a city that has millions of none native english speakers. I’m just guessing that each one of those bins would end up mixed a defeat the purpose of three separate ones.
Oh, Green = bio, Blue = recyclables. How original… another glamor-cap for a steel drum.
But at least it’s top heavy and easily over-turned… 
Sorry, waste of public funding. Just put the can out on the curb. It’s enough just to get people to throw their trash in any receptacle, I don’t think sugar coating it, as it were, will increase the probability.
I’ve thought this for a long time, LMO…I can’t think of any good reason why we NEED recycling. Not saying recycling is bad, but saying the system of recycling is bad. We should be able to put all of our garbage out to the street and it get sorted later. Human ingenuity could make it happen. The fact that recycling isn’t EVERYWHERE is because it is a system that expects people to change behavior.
If every garbage bin could handle ALL garbage and it got sorted at the transfer station, etc. We’d be far better off.
In Pismo Beach we have three waster containers per household.
The big green one, for Bio-material (lawn clippings, leaves, limbs, scrap wood, etc.)
The brown one, for “garbage” (vegetable scraps, bones, egg shells, etc.)
The blue one, for “recyclables” (styrofoam trays, plastic bags, packaging fiberboard, newspaper, etc.)
And every Thursday morning, starting at 06:00, three self-loading trucks make they way through the neighborhood, one for each “set” of containers. And it all ends up at the same local landfill.
Three trucks to do the job of one if, as you suggest, all that material could be segregated.
It’s like airport security… the illusion that it must be working because it is a hassle to deal with.
There is a solution that works, have people so poor that they sort the trash for their own existence. Then you don’t have to put forth any effort on the post-consumption level.
On the design, it looks like a primary aspect of the design is explosive blast mitigation.
I can’t think of any good reason why we NEED recycling. Not saying recycling is bad, but saying the system of recycling is bad. We should be able to put all of our garbage out to the street and it get sorted later. Human ingenuity could make it happen.
At uni. we saw a video of this huge German recycling machine that did just that, all the recycling goes on a conveyor that shakes/ picks out/ removes all the different bits- like the end of “Toy Story 3”. The problem is plastic bags that stretch out and don’t break, but turn into a filament that gets caught on all the moving parts and clogs it up.
The best solution would be to legislate (oh no! big government!) so pretty much all stuff that is thrown away is biodegradable, or could be made to biodegrade (i.e. bio-engineered bacteria that can eat oil-based plastics and poo out flowers).
so this is the guy who designed it : Bryant Park's Tulip Trash Bins Win Design Prize - Midtown & Theater District - New York - DNAinfo
the aesthetics of it seem the fit the park environment well, it looks almost like a flower head. it does not look difficult or too expensive to manufacture - seems like a series of rolled and blanked steel plates welded within a jig to make the exterior body.
@ dubya : i agree that maybe some clear iconographics to help users identify the trash type for each bin might help.
@ ip_wirelessly : i would agree that it is difficult to get people to change their behaviour concerning disposal of trash. sometimes when people are disposing trash, i think they just have the feeling ’ i want rid of this ‘thing’ quickly > dump it !’ rather than rationally deciding which container to put it in, which seems like too much of an effort sometimes. it would be great if we could put all of our trash into a into a universal waste receptacle that could somehow identify it and then segregate it accordingly. maybe i’m dreaming here but if disposable things had some kind of rfid or q.r. codes to help identify them…
maybe something like this big belly solar powered trash compactor with a universal mouth to receive trash and then 3~ different compactors within for different trash type.
@nxakt : that is already happening in many ways. sometimes i hear a noise outside my house, i look in front and there is some guy going through all my trash collecting cans and bottles and putting them in a shopping trolley already stacked with an impossible load. what do you mean by ‘explosive blast mitigation’ ? it all sounds kind of apocalyptic…
@ssanjy009 : do you know the name of that company or have a link to the video ? the germans are doing some amazing work in the field of recycling. and they have stiff penalties for people who are caught breaking recycling laws.
i’m fascinated with urban design and the comments here have got me thinking about the municipal and domestic recycling processes and possibilities. there seems to be many different complexities here and system level design considerations concerning smart waste disposal and recycling systems - not least being the front end user and their values of garbage disposal and recycling. as much as i’m interested in exploring this area further and venturing ideas of products and systems which might help solve it, i would love to know of any anthropological studies concerning consumer waste disposal and recycling. any suggestions and links are kindly appreciated.
I think it was in Israel they were having problems with terrorists putting bombs in public trash cans. Apparently it’s a concern here now too.
Not seeing how that thing would mitigate anything bigger than an m-80, but that’s not really my area of expertise.
Design for public spaces has to consider the negatives of terrorism unfortunately. Based on personal observations of public trash bins lately, the content visiblity seems to be a consideration. The metal design looks like it is designed to flatten out like a flower and not spray (more) shrapnel out. It is just my perception and deduction of a NYC trash can application would require.
Quick google search turns up these links on other approaches.
http://www.blastgardintl.com/bp_mtr.asp
http://www.americaninnovations.com/resources/protecting-americans-facilities-from-improvised-explosive-devices.php
Bomb Resistant Waste Receptacles, Blast Mitigation Trash Receptacles, GSA (weight starting at 1400 pounds!)