Throwing away garbage used to be one of life’s effortless pleasures. Stuff goes in bag. Bag gets thrown outside.
Never think about it again.
Kids can do it. Heck, my criminally stupid neighbor’s Labrador once managed to pull an entire garbage bag through the doggy door and halfway down the block.
That dog knew the essentials of garbage disposal: Away from the house, friends. Then my building installed so-called smart waste bins in our basement garbage room. Now I argue with my trash can more than I do with my extended family.
When I first encountered this monster, I had my hands full of a soggy bag of kitchen scraps following an ill-advised kimchi experiment. There it sat: a smart-looking stainless steel cylinder with what I assume was a touchscreen in place of a trash can handle. I swiped my rotting garbage bag back and forth in front of it like a magician fumbling with his deck, waiting for it to magically accept my offerings.
It did nothing. Scanning the trash can’s pristine label, I found a QR code with a tempting “Are you new to EcoSort?” underneath it. My trash can came with its own app.
Well, hell. Why the hell not? I’m already getting sprayed with cabbage guts, I thought, weighing the merits of pouring garbage over this stupid bin to make my point.
I could just leave my trash can out here as performance art, blockbusters. But I’m an avid garbage law follower (and my neighbor Mrs. Kaplan literally has nothing else to do than report people like me to the condominium board) so I clumsily balanced my phone between shoulder and cheek to download another needless app that would undoubtedly spam me with garbage notifications.
After setting up an account – yes, an account with password standards and email verification for GOD’S SAKE, a TRASH CAN – I was treated to a tutorial. On how to throw away garbage. My jaw hung open as my new best friend began explaining itself to me with the quiet confidence of a kindergarden principal.
“You’ll need to sort all of your trash into the correct categories before we can empty our containers,” the app proudly announced at me. “Ready to get started?”
Its scanner and internal scale would determine whether I’d sorted my trash into the correct bins. Landfill, recycling, compost – it had separate compartments for everything and would only open if I put the correct type of trash near it.
Plus, the can would monitor my “waste analytics” and reward me with a sustainability score each month, proudly displayed on a leaderboard in the basement for everyone to admire. Because letting your neighbors know you don’t recycle enough is sure to make people open dairy containers with more care. The first thing I tried to throw away contained compost (food scraps), recycling (junk mail), and landfill (paper towels).
I might as well have shot gunned a beer in front of it. Lights began flashing angrily on the bin. “YOUR CONTAINER IS TOO DIRTY TO SCAN,” “SORT YOUR WASTE CORRECTLY,” and other cheerful messages popped up on screen.
“It’s garbage,” I mumbled knowingly, as if I was trying to reason with it. An adjacent neighbor spotted me angrily gesturing at my trash can and decided to stop for a chat. “Oh yeah you gotta sort it before you even come down here,” she said smugly, rolling her eyes at me like we were teammates who’ve both been victorious over the trash can.
“I’ve got like four bins downstairs myself just to sort it out. So I guess it’s quicker.”
Wait what? So now I had to sort my trash OUTSIDE my apartment before taking it down to sort it again for the sorting trash can?
What even was the point anymore? After three swearing-filled attempts at getting my dumb bin to accept my trash, I gave up on high tech trash disposal and lugged my bags of spoiled kimchi back upstairs where it languished for another miserable day in my kitchen garbage before I had the willpower to deal with it. True to its word, I got faster at sorting my trash over the coming weeks.
Purchased bins for my kitchen. Studied the rules. Then I got good at it.
Too good. The trash can began catching errors. One apple core clipped into the recycling went “ITEM REJECTED: COMPOSTABLE MATERIAL DETECTED.”
“ALEXA, TEACH ME PRIVACY TERMS.”
It seemed my trash can didn’t like me wasting pineapple stickers.
But it wasn’t alone in policing my garbage habits. A few days later, I tried tossing a plastic clamshell container that my grocery store baker had used to store cookies. You know the ones.
Clear plastic top, black plastic bottom. Recyclable? Maybe?
I set it on the scanner, tapped recycling, and waited. ITEM REJECTED. “This type of plastic cannot be recycled in your area.”
Fine.
I switched to landfill. INCORRECT WASTE STREAM. “This product can be recycled at your local materials recovery facility.”
Losing my patience, I selected compost.
FAIL. CONTAMINATION WARNING. PLEASE DO NOT PLACE NON-COMPOSTABLES IN COMPOST WASTE STREAM.
I half-heartedly tapped my container over every bin. Nothing. I glared at my innocuous plastic bag of cookies like it were the one giving me trouble.
Except it wasn’t the bag of cookies. It was the trash can itself. None of the receptacles would budge.
It judged me. That little pixelated trash can icon flashed at me, silently judging my shit until I got it nice and sorted. Or gave up and tried again tomorrow.
“What do I do with this?” I yelled at it. My Echo machine responded through the trash can’s app: “Please visit the Metropolitan Recycling Center at 262 West 35th Street Monday through Friday 10am-4pm to recycle this item.”
It was a two hour round trip just to throw away a piece of trash. I ended up throwing the clamshell container in the standard chute on my floor.
Luckily for me, those hadn’t been converted to EcoSort “smart” bins just yet. Balancing my contraband garbage between my fingers, I sneaked off giggling like a kid with a candy bar. Over time, more quirks popped up in EcoSort’s behavior.
If I forgot to remove the label from a pill bottle before tossing it, it would warn me my privacy was at risk. If I put two pieces of trash too close together on the scanner, it warned me I was contaminating the area. Once I forgot to remove a rubber band from a bundle of recycled cans and bottles and its algorithm detected I was a sinner hiding recyclables from its judgement.
Someone got on Reddit and hacked into its software to give the entire building BADGES for most recycled pizza boxes. My trash can knew when I ate pizza. For Christmas, my building Manager sent us all a newsletter announcing yet another stupid “feature.” The EcoSort could now sync with our other smart appliances and even Amazon grocery deliveries to better predict…something.
Apparently my fridge was chatting up my trash can about what I ate too often, and now they were judging me together. “Our records show that you buy a large bottle of milk each week,” it informed me one day as it rejected a bag of finished milk I forgot to pour out, “yet often less than half of that milk is consumed before it spoils. Reduce waste by purchasing smaller quantities.”
Last week I had friends over for dinner and someone – Ryan, don’t argue with me online – tossed a compostable fork into my trash can.
My phone buzzed. “INCOMPLETE SORTING IN KITCHEN BIN DETECTED,” it read. How does it know I have a kitchen?
Since then, I’ve resorted to pouring all garbage that getsrejected by my trash can into a box I keep in my closet. Once a month, I drive out to my parents’ house in the middle of nowhere just so I can chuck their unwanted “TrashCan’s Rejects” into their garbage cans. Mountains of turquoise, green, and black trash bags that men in hazardous waste suits haul away every other Tuesday.
My mom waved at me suspiciously as I placed my bags on her shiny touchscreen bin. “You should get one of these for the city apartment,” she said, patting its glass surface like it were a content puppy. “It sorts your garbage for you.”
“It sorts your garbage itself,” I deadpanned.
The future had arrived, whether we liked it or not. I’m all for cutting back on waste and improving my recycling habits. It makes me feel like I’m helping out the planet or whatever.
I don’t know much about climate change, but I am pretty sure tossing a banana peel into the right bin won’t tip the scales either way.
But what happened to me and my fellow mailslot dwellers in that basement last summer wasn’t technology solving a problem – it was technology creating division. When your trash can starts keeping score of how good of a person you are based on garbage you throw away, we’ve entered the panopticon.
My lease is ending in three weeks. If there’s one thing I need in my next apartment, it’s a dumb dumpster. Please, someone, feed my addiction to mindless garbage disposal.
0 Comments