New York, NY - Plenty Magazine - Environmental News and Commentary:
Clean Tech to Smash Trash
January 6, 2008 07:54 AM
"...here’s an innovation that packs a more powerful punch—a solar-powered trash compactor called BigBelly. Designed for city streets, the compactor collects and compresses trash and basically looks just like an ordinary trash bin. The compactor’s top is covered with 30 watts worth of solar cells, which charge a 12-volt battery that powers the compactor’s electrical motor. A built-in sensor reads when the bin is full and then neatly crushes its contents
The cool part of this project is that the increased capacity of the bins means that they don’t need to be emptied as frequently. Each bin can hold about 150 gallons of trash, or 5 times as much as an ordinary trash can of the same volume. A city could easily implement a whole slew of them on certain streets and cut back on the number of runs along an entire garbage-collection route. This would enable savings on labor and fuel costs from garbage trucks, and of course on the emissions from those vehicles, as well..."