BigBelly

Ever walked down a street and seen trash cans filled to the top or even overflowing? Trash bins overflowing with rubbish, littering the landscape from city streets to local beaches with mountains of plastic bottles, newspapers, well pretty much everything that you can imagine. Well this disaster was the beginning of a wonderful change in the eyes of engineers.

After learning that garbage trucks are one of the most costly vehicles to operate, in which they consume over 1 billion gallons of diesel fuel each year in the United States alone and limp along getting an average of 2.8 miles to the gallon. The team formed a company in 2003 to take on the growing waste management problem and design a new kind of trash receptacle.

BigBelly Solar had a few very specific design goals: The trash compactor had to be around the size of a normal receptacle so it could easily fit street-side; the unit had to process larger quantities of trash to reduce the frequency of garbage pickup, and it had to be standalone so it could derive power from an alternative energy source. Wind was quickly ruled out because the energy source wasn't constant and it was too dangerous to have wind turbines lined up across city streets.

Today, there are over 1,700 BigBelly solar trash compactors spread across the U.S. and the world, including a couple of high-profile units at Boston's Fenway Park and the Portland Oregon Zoo. At 300 lb and about the same height and width of an average receptacle, BigBelly compresses the equivalent of five trash cans into a single receptacle, which helps companies and municipalities avoid four out of five garbage collection trips, on average.

The newest iteration of BigBelly launched last year and the company is planning new designs, including a dumpster-sized system and adding new technology that communicates information wirelessly back and forth between the unit and its owner. In this way, customers can get a sense of when a BigBelly unit is full and arrange trash pickup accordingly.

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