Tag: garbage

OM in the News: The Future of Trash Pickup and AI

Americans are among the top producers of trash per capita. Each person in the U.S. disposes of nearly a ton of refuse annually. Simplifying trash day, and diverting the 80% of reusable material that still ends up in landfills, is one key to solving our problems.

Urban planners, the refuse industry and cities across the country are reimagining how we manage and dispose of our waste, reports The Wall Street Journal (Aug. 28, 2025). The New York City and MIT are among those leveraging AI, robotics and electric power to tackle a growing garbage crisis fueled by cheap products and throwaway culture.

Most of Americans don’t recycle regularly, citing the inconvenience and confusion involved in sorting their trash. To help people up their sustainability game, sanitation engineers are promoting a new system: the single-stream model. The operation is simple—residents throw everything into one trash bin. Then, that waste is transported to a remote facility, where AI-powered cameras and robots sort it, diverting items that can be recycled. The goal is to have a system that’s more circular, that can reuse and recycle things more.

AI can also identify items such as electronics that contain hazardous or valuable materials—including copper, silver, gold and rare-earth minerals—and send them on for disassembly and harvesting before they enter the waste stream.

Individual garbage bins or piles of plastic bags aren’t only an all-you-can-eat buffet for rodents—but also malodorous, leaky and inefficient, requiring endless noisy stops from garbage trucks on collection day.

The new NYC shared Empire Garbage Bins.

To solve these problems, cities are moving toward containerization: large, centralized bins shared by a street or neighborhood. One NYC neighborhood  is already piloting a program of such containers, with plans for citywide expansion in the future.

Smart bins could even ping dispatch offices when they are ready for pickup. Large collection vehicles could be used more sparingly, and with fewer stops—thus decreasing noise, pickup time and pollution. In the future, the parameters that we use could be, ‘Is it full? Or is it smelly?’ Then collection on that bin can take place only if the contents meet those conditions.

AI-optimized routing and trash-loading technologies could also help make pickups shorter, less frequent and less disruptive.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. How could AI be used to help recycle?
  2. What are the major inefficiencies of most garbage collection and recycling systems?

OM in the News: The Hidden Problems of Recycling

I am not an adamant tree hugger, but my family certainly takes our household recycling seriously, as I am sure many of you do. So it came as a bit of a shock to find that our local garbage company (which sends separate trucks for normal garbage and recycled goods), took our recycling can and mixed it with the normal can. It turns out they ship it all to the same landfill since the city can’t afford to sort and recycle anymore. The New York Times now reports (March 16, 2019) that “recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country.”

Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator. The Memphis airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. (The airport is keeping its recycling bins in place to preserve “the culture” of recycling among passengers and employees). Hundreds of cities across the country have quietly canceled recycling programs.

Prompting this nationwide reckoning is China, which until 2018 had been a big buyer of recyclable material collected in the U.S. That stopped when China determined that too much trash was mixed in with recyclable materials like cardboard and certain plastics. After that, Thailand and India started to accept more imported scrap, but even they are imposing new restrictions. With fewer buyers, recycling companies are recouping their lost profits by charging cities more, in some cases 4 times what they charged last year.

Amid the soaring costs, cities and towns are making hard choices about whether to raise taxes, cut other municipal services or abandon an effort that took hold during the environmental movement of the 1970s. The troubles with recycling have amplified calls for limiting waste at its source. Measures like banning plastic bags and straws, long pushed by environmental groups, are gaining traction more widely.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. As a student, what is your obligation to recycle now that you know it may be economically inefficient?
  2. Should taxpayers subsidize recycling?