Talk about multi-tasking. MIT’s Senseable City Lab, which tries to find ways to better understand modern cities, has a great new program called City Scanner. They are taking single-purpose garbage trucks and turning them into multi-tasking centers. There are currently five trucks in Cambridge, Massachusetts that are measuring many variables including air pollution, traffic status, landfill use and infrastructure decay. They have managed to identify energy leaks in buildings, potholes that need repairs and much more.
Data they collect is transferred to Wi-Fi hotspots and MIT is considering this a living experiment. They are also hoping, at MIT, to reduce the size of the kit they have created so that they could get similar information from smaller vehicles including school buses.
At the moment, the kits cost $1000 each. But Carlo Ratti, the MIT Senseable City Lab Director points out that with just a few sensors you can scan the whole city on a regular basis.
Certainly, this is a creative idea and for companies that have landfills like the Bridgeton, this could allow for interesting partnerships and a real way to multi-task while offering waste management services.
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