Read the full story in Scientific American.

It isn’t the most picturesque of locations, but a number of scientists spent their summer taking in the 25.9-million-square-kilometer oval of the Pacific Ocean known as the North Subtropical Gyre, or “Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch,” located about 1,600 kilometers off California’s coast.

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition’s (SEAPLEX) research vessel (R/V) New Horizon returned to California earlier this week after spending about three weeks studying pools of plastic debris that have collected in the gyre, in particular their impact on marine life.

Read the full story in the New York Times about MIT’s Senseable City Laboratory.

A project that tracks garbage through the waste disposal system over the next three months will help give people a concrete sense of their impact on the environment.

Read the full story in Environmental Protection.

A team of MIT researchers on July 15 announced Trash Track, a project that aims to get people thinking about what they throw away.

Trash Track relies on the development of special electronic tags that will track different types of waste on their journey through the disposal systems of New York and Seattle.

The project will monitor the patterns and costs of urban disposal and create awareness of the impact of trash on our environment — revealing the last journey of our everyday objects.

Read the full story in Scientific American.

Most people assume that their trash ends up in a landfill somewhere far away (if they think about this at all). But growing concern over the environmental impact of waste—discarded electronics, in particular—has prompted a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) to take a high-tech approach to studying exactly what people are tossing out and where those items are ending up.

Via The Scout Report.

Waste Online

Sure enough, there is a good deal of “waste” online, so it’s nice to learn about the Waste Online website which serves as a great repository for information about an entirely different set of waste-related matters. This British-based website has been funded by the New Opportunities Fund Digitise project. The project is overseen by Waste Watch, which is “the leading environmental charity dedicated to the reduction, reuse and recycling of household waste.” First-time visitors can get started by clicking on “Wacky waste facts”, which contains some basic facts about the nature of waste in the United Kingdom. In the same vicinity, visitors can dig deeper by looking into sections titled “The problem with waste”, “Waste in the workplace”, and “Waste at home”. Moving on, the “Search our library” area allows guests to
the site to look for specific items of interest related to dozens of topics, such as household recycling, office recycling, and metal recycling. Moving along, the “Information Sheets” area features almost two dozen fact sheets that can be used as guides to composting, battery recycling, and the history of waste.

Series from February 2009 issue of The Economist on waste.  The summary:

Environmental worries have transformed the waste industry, says Edward McBride. But governments’ policies remain largely incoherent.