With Tiny Cans, a New Trash Equation
Similarly, trading your bit garbage can for a daintier disposal bin may remind you to send less trash to the landfill.
In June 2010, faculty, mace and administrators at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire had their desk trash cans replaced with six-inch-tall cartons. One year later, Dartmouth has sent 200 less tons of trash to the landfill, and recycling is up by one third.
It’s a severe strategy. Every desk gets one large “zero sort” recycling box for line, glass, aluminum and plastic and one tiny trash tub for whatever cannot be recycled, which at Dartmouth is essentially a few types of drink lids and inexorable types of plastic bags and packaging materials. When the trash tub reaches its meager capacity, the owner has to empty it at a disposal space.
Rosi Kerr, director of sustainability at Dartmouth, said that at first, people were a bit put out by the change. “It’s a odd thing, but trash is actually pretty personal, and people find being told what to do with their trash rather invasive,” she said. The inconsequential in reference to of the program, however, is to make trash even more personal by asking people to ponder just how much they’re throwing out — or as Ms. Kerr put it, “have a relationship with your trash.”
