Boston, MA – Boston College Facilities Management recently installed three eco-friendly trash compactors on campus. The solar- powered units, each a little larger than a regular trash can, compact the trash placed in them, allowing them to contain more trash and necessitating less frequent collection.

The three receptacles are located in the Dustbowl, between Kostka Hall and Gonzaga Hall, and near Yawkey Center.

The receptacles have appeared across the Boston area in the past two years, said Deirdre Manning, director of sustainability and energy management. The city of Boston, in particular, has embraced the product. Mayor Thomas M. Menino has championed them as a way to reduce litter and cut back on labor costs. In 2005, when a trial of the compactors was launched in the city, Menino said to reporters, “Too much of the Boston Parks and Recreation Department’s annual budget is spent on cleaning up trash that hasn’t been disposed of properly.” BigBelly units were also recently installed in Fenway Park. Manufactured by BigBelly Solar, they are powered entirely by solar energy.

Manning said that there are a number of advantages that the BigBelly units offer over simpler trash receptacles. According to BigBelly Solar materials, the units, which are only for trash, can hold the contents of up to five ordinary trash containers, thereby requiring fewer pickups and eliminating litter created by overflowing bins. “They compact the trash, reducing the labor for the grounds crew, so there is a savings in terms of labor,” Manning said. “They were targeted where grounds crews had been unable to keep up with the trash.”

Read the Full Article

---

Needham, MA – With a name like BigBelly, this trash can sounds like it’s meant to be stuffed, and it is.

The can is designed to hold about five times the volume of a typical waste receptacle because it’s a trash compactor, but it’s no average crusher – it operates on solar power.

The BigBelly solar trash compactor from Needham, Mass.- based BigBelly Solar is the first and so far only stand-alone solar-powered trash compaction system. The company, which began its life as Seahorse Power Co., was started in 2003 because founder Jim Poss said he kept seeing overflowing garbage cans in downtown Boston.

“I had a background in electronics, especially electric vehicles, so I knew in my head how to solve the problem: with a solar-powered trash compactor. I knew it was technologically feasible to run it purely off solar power, but it wasn’t very easy to get there. It took four years to figure it out, but the machines work great, even with ambient light at bus stops in Seattle,” Poss said.

“You don’t have to worry about the wiring, you can move things around. But with our solar technology, we had to develop some pretty advanced, actually very advanced, energy management systems to power this compactor for a couple of reasons: Typically with trash cans you’re not dealing with locations that have a lot of sunlight. You don’t have a choice to put them where the sun is so strong, so we had to push the technology to allow us to do that. And we had to generate 1,400 pounds of force to compress the trash in any location, even those with lousy solar exposure. Basically, we have to run our panels where the sun don’t shine.”

The unit holds 150 gallons of trash, compacted to about 20 percent of its normal size. This allows for longer stretches of time between collections, saving time and fuel and freeing workers to do other things.

“We looked deeper and found a lot of other problems out there,” Poss said. “Litter overflows in the parks, on the beaches and into the sewers, but it’s the collection that is a huge burden. The trucks are expensive and get about 3 miles to the gallon, and they burn over a billion gallons of diesel a year. Think about all the problems associated with that and how it could improve if we cut consumption.”

Putting BigBelly cans on beaches, for example, reduces litter that attracts seagulls, thereby reducing droppings that contribute to bacterial contamination of the water, Poss said.

“We want to take the garbage trucks and help people use them as efficiently as possible,” he said. “If we can make one truck as effective as four trucks, that’s a good thing. The cheapest, most efficient garbage truck is the one you don’t have to use as much.”

See the Article

Palm Springs, CA – The City of Palm Springs has received a $137,700 grant from the County of Riverside through the Coachella Valley Air Quality Enhancement Trust Fund for several projects to improve air quality.

The City will install 20 BigBelly cordless solar-powered trash compactors in high-traffic areas of the Downtown business district. These compactors will replace 60 existing conventional open trash containers which, in turn, will reduce the frequency and number of trash collections that City employees must perform each day.

The ultimate goal is to replace all 150 existing trash containers with a total of 60 BigBelly solar-powered compactors over a three-year period.

“We believe that implementation of these compactors will reduce pollution from vehicles and man-hours spent on servicing existing trash containers by cutting down the frequency of trash collection trips,” said Assistant City Manager Troy Butzlaff.

The City successfully field tested these compactors last year in the downtown area.

“Based on our experience thus far, we are confident that these compactors will reduce carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles by as much as 79 percent over a five-year period,” Butzlaff said. “That is huge when you consider how much carbon dioxide, soot and nitrogen oxide is being produced by the vehicles currently being used to service the existing containers.”