At parks, businesses, stadiums, beaches, and any other public place there have to be trash cans to keep the area trash free. Now, you can hope that there are also recycling bins but not everything can be recycled.
There are some problems with the trash can system that are not very sustainable. One example is trash has to be picked up and hauled to a landfill, normally by a gas guzzling truck. Depending on how often that trash can is full, that is a lot of wasted gas and energy just hauling the trash. A second example is it is hard to know when the trash cans will be full. Sure, most places have a system where they collect the trash at certain times a week depending on historical information, but what about those days when the trash cans do overflow and trash is spilling out all over the place? Often that trash blows away somewhere polluting the area. A third example is a lot of animals like to feed off the trash, which is often unhealthy for the animals and it can cause pollution if the animals drag the trash anywhere and leave it.
These examples show that trash collection is really not green. Luckily. there is a company out there that recognized this problem and decided to make a solution – the Big Belly Solar Trash Compacter.
The Big Belly Solar Trash Compacter is a trash can that is powered by the sun through solar panels and it compacts the trash inside of it using the energy from the sun. How cool! (Doesn’t even have to be direct sunlight, even indirect sunlight powers the solar panels on top of the can.)
These trash cans can actually hold 5 times more trash than a regular trash can because it compacts the trash into a smaller space. Therefore, this means less pickups to haul the trash to a landfill. Also, the Big Belly Solar Trash Compacter has a wireless component that basically automatically sends a message when the compacter is full! So, no more guessing when the right time is to pick up the trash, this trash compacter will actually tell you! This is great because that also means there won’t be trash spillage polluting the environment. Another great feature of the Big Belly Solar Trash Compacter is that the design is not penetrable by animals so animals can not eat the potentially harmful garbage nor can they take the trash anywhere causing more pollution.
Trash is definitely not a good thing and we hope to decrease what goes into landfills. It is nice to hear that Big Belly Solar is doing their part to make the trash collecting process greener. I hope I start seeing these everywhere!
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We have these in addition to regular trashcans on our campus (40K plus people).