Bainbridge Island, WA - Kitsap Sun:
Business Spotlight: Greening Up the Garbage Can
April 7, 2008 09:12 AM
Bainbridge Island, WA -You see them at bus stops on Third Avenue in downtown Seattle, in Tacoma and at ball fields in Redmond.
Now you can get a closer look at one on Bainbridge Island next to City Hall.
Solar trash compactor cans are making a soft debut in the Northwest and West Coast. It's a good bet we'll see more here, now that president and CEO of BigBelly Solar, Jim Poss, has moved from near the company's Needham, Mass., headquarters to Bainbridge to develop the West Coast market.
Using the sun's rays to power in-can mechanics that stomp down trash with the force of six men, about 1,400 BigBellies are in 32 states and 15 countries. Production started in 2004.
"I believe the Pacific Northwest is environmentally and intellectually capable of leading the rest of the nation in terms of implementing this kind of solution," he said Tuesday.
Pickups with BigBellies are much less frequent than with conventional cans, he said, which saves labor and energy in a nation that spends a billion gallons of fuel a year to collect trash.
Made of steel and recycled plastic, each unit weights 330 pounds. A 30-watt solar collector tops each one. The collector powers a motor that raises a big "foot" to stomp down trash with 1,300 pounds of pressure.
"Most trash is air," he said. "So we're squeezing the air out."
His compactor holds up to 200 gallons of trash, compared with the 40-gallon capacity of a regular can.
Poss said his solar compactors are for areas with high pedestrian traffic where cans fill up fast, and for remote locations like trails or beaches where garbage trucks must travel miles for the pickup.