Why people choose to throw their trash everywhere on the streets is beyond me. I don’t know about you. I always feel strange if I were to dirty a place. Hell, I even clean up my table after eating in a public foodcourt. Anyways, for perpetual litter bugs, perhaps they just need a little encouragement/incentive to not to anyhow dump their trash as they move around the city, and for the rest of us who has some civic consciousness left in us, we can use a little visual entertainment to alleviate the boredom of putting trash in its rightful place. The TetraBIN, a brainchild of startup out of Urban-X, Sencity, is exactly the trash bin that will do the aforementioned.
This three-sided trash receptacle has a LED screen wrapped around it that display graphics that will change the way you look at public trash can. It is connected and packed with sensors to enable the owners to be aware of the fill levels, collects usage data and even dishing out customized content to be displayed on the screens. I know what you are thinking: “yay! ads opportunity for owners!” But Sencity is a moral superhero of sort. According to a report by Engadget, the outfit chose to “partner with cities and local business improvement districts to get its containers on the streets.”
In other words, ads isn’t Sencity priority, but getting people to throw trash into designated receptacle is. And that brings us to the part on user experience. Users will have a whole new experience when dropping off their trash and this may include earning rewards in the form of redemption code or even physical items sent to the user’s mail for throwing waste into the bin. On the grand scheme of things, Sencity hope throwing trash into the rightful containers will become something that people will do automatically and not a chore, and with the ‘game’ concept it has planned for the TetraBIN, it also hope to cultivate the habit in children.
But to enable all of the aforementioned, it has to be connected and powered, and while 4G is used for connectivity, power requirement could be a issue that need dealing with in a developed city where most power allocation has been spoken for. Of course, you can always find placement next a store or maybe even a bus stop, but don’t they want it to be out on the streets and in the open? And then you have abused and vandalism, which will very likely to happen in cities like NYC, to content with.
The concept behind TetraBIN is cool, albeit appearing a little too idealistic, but if it works as planned, it could be an alternative to punishment in return for not dropping trash into the bin. Then again, you can never trust humans to do the right thing, can you?
Images: Sencity/Engadget.
