Idea Factory — Secure Garbage Collection
May. 30, 2011 13:30 in
Idea Factory
It’s a fact of law that when you put your garbage on the street, anyone can paw through it to their heart’s content. This can be a problem for two groups of people — celebrities and criminals.
General Concepts:
Offer a refuse collection service where the trash is not “thrown out,” but rather has its ownership transferred. At no point in time would the refuse be “on the street,” so no external parties would be legally able to access it.
Problems Foreseen:
- To put it mildly, this would be rather costly business to start, between the capital requirements for the pickup process, the legal hurdles to be properly permitted and the like
- Not a very large market of potential clients
- Even those clients are generally spread unevenly across a large geographical region
- It’s not just The Sopranos — waste management has a tendency to involve somewhat shady people
- Unless you have some very spiffy technology involved, there is little barrier to prevent entry by the existing waste management companies.
Mitigations:
- With regards to both capital and legal hurdles, there’s not much that can be done there; rent seeking is just a fact of life.
- There may be geographical concentrations (Hollywood, perhaps); for ones that are spread out, either collect less often (once a week, every other week, etc) to lower the fuel costs and work in sectors or … yeah, I don’t know.
- One of the thoughts I had on this was to create an RFID transmitter/receiver pair where the transmitter lives on the garbage truck and the receiver(s) live on the trash receptacle. When the truck pulls within ‘x’ feet, the trash can would unlock for disposal.
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