High-Tech Trash Cans Crunch Number Of Downtown Pickups

(WRTV 6 News) - Bloomington officials say they’re greener and leaner thanks to more downtown trash cans.

The city’s sanitation department installed 10 solar-powered trash compactors in the downtown area with money gleaned from federal stimulus funds, 6News’ Rick Hightower reported.

Bloomington Sanitation Director Shelby Walker demonstrates one of the City's new BigBelly solar compactors

“This was the greenest thing we could do … to use a BigBelly Solar Compactor,” said Shelby Walker, Bloomington’s sanitation director.

Indiana University student Francie Schrank, who tossed her coffee cup in the container, agreed that the compactors fit with a forward-thinking pace in Bloomington.

“There’s been a lot of initiatives on campus this year to go coal-free,” Schrank said. “There’s been sustainability for IU, so I just think it fits with the trend of everything that’s happening around us.”

Some question whether the compactors will ever pay for themselves and whether they work on cloudy days, but officials say they don’t need direct sunlight to function.

“What it allows us to do is lessen our carbon footprint in the downtown area,” Walker said. “We’re not here every day servicing this unit.”

The trash vehicle that services downtown gets about three miles per gallon. In the long run, officials think, the new containers will cut the need to dump cans daily, like traditional cans.

Walker said that once software is in place, he will be able to monitor when the cans are full and need dumping from his computer.

“If we don’t have to come down here as often and stop as often, then we’ll have the fuel savings as well, as well as it frees that worker up to do other things throughout the city,” he said.

The city hopes to eventually remove the traditional trash cans from around downtown and encourage residents and visitors to deposit their trash in the solar receptacles, all of which are in high-traffic areas.

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