Now this is one of those great innovations looking at a societal system and identifying the its ecological and cost structure and then innovating to bring benefits to both.

In this case that system is trash collection and disposal. The system being, installing the bins, collecting the trash and truck logistics, disposing of it.

Big Belly is a solar powered trash compactor built into a municipal bin. Which allows up it to hold up to 5 times the amount of trash. USD 3,600–3,900, (AUD 4300-4700).

Now I’ve grabbed a few rough estimates from my construction contacts of installing a bin in Melbourne Australia and your looking at around $1000-1500 fully installed (Feel free to provide your own data).

So if we now can cut down the number of trips to an individual bin because it overflows only 1/5 as much, this must save on petrol. Also it saves on compaction stopping time by the truck company, and they can run less sophisticated trucks witout compactors (not an overnight change of their fleet obviously). Now the bin is solar powered and with normal PV you need good sunlight - not good for some cities - but you could use cheaper dyesolar cells to bring the cost down and allow low light operation. Next week i have an interview with Sylvia Tulloch from Dyesol talking about their dye solar cell technology.

I’d be interested to understand the full system cost and emissions breakdown these have.

A collegue and friend of mine Doug Smith from Village Green who runs a sustainable management consultancy is well versed in these sorts of systemic solutions. As a cafe owner, he thought it ludicrous that all the cafe’s along the stretch of shops in the city had different trash collection providers for their waste, a relic of the ins and outs of cafe ownership and waste management industry. So much so that in one small block of a city there were 6 waste management companies servicing it, so that each and every night a truck from a different company would be coming for the trash. This created problems with noise, garbage bins always being out, not to mention increased fuel costs which were being passed onto the owners.

His solution was to talk with the other owners and choose one company. Not a simple process given contracts etc with small business, but he did it, and now runs a very successful company in Australia helping other small and large businesses do exactly the same. Check them out at www.villagegreen.com.au

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 1:52 pm and is filed under General, PV, cleantech, climate change, company, environment, solar, sustainability, waste management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.