During a move, you generate an insane amount of garbage. If you haven’t moved recently, trust me, you would be astounded at the obscene quantity of cardboard boxes, wrappers, plastic holders etc. one amasses and needs to get rid of.

A garbage bin in New York- no separation of different types of trash.

When I moved to San Francisco from the East Coast, you know what drove me crazy, more than anything else? The fact that I never knew where to throw my garbage out. In New York, we usually put everything in the trash... and then bottles went in the recycling... or something... San Francisco, however, is super into disposing of waste in ways that help the environment. Very cool. But for me, the new resident, this brings a lot of frustration. Which bin, out of the 3 choices, does my trash go into?

I am working on a new tool with my friend Garen Checkley that will help San Franciscans know which bin to throw their trash into. It's called TrashySF, and it's in development! If you hate trash like me or you want to make sure you are being as green as you can, TrashySF will make your life easier.

Discovering the problem

Faced with my heap of garbage, I searched the internet for help to figure out what trash goes in which bin. I found paragraphs of explanatory text and convoluted diagrams with many words. I ended up printing out charts from Recology (the company that contracts with the city of San Francisco to take care of garbage pickup) and taping them onto my closet door. There is a separate chart for compost, landfill, and recycling. These charts almost did more harm than good. They used categorizations I didn’t use in my head and I hated having to scan lists when all I really wanted to do was throw something out and move on with my life.

Growing frustration leads to the idea

Out of all this wasted time and frustration came the idea for a way to make it all better. What if there was a tool that could give you the answer to the question “which bin does it go in?” as fast as you ask it?

When I am standing there holding my greasy Chinese take-out box, I don’t care about anything other than the answer to the question: WHERE DOES IT GO? I don’t want to look at a chart. I don’t want to skim paragraphs. I just want to know one word: landfill, compost, or recycling. Ideally I could just think “chinese take-out box” and one of those words would be projected on my closet door. Unfortunately we are not there yet, so TrashySF willl just have to do.

How I see TrashySF working

TrashySF should do nothing more ask than you “what do you want to get rid of?” You input the item, and TrashySF tells you the answer. It does not over-complicate this with images, facts about how much good you are doing for the environment, and similar items to throw out. The focus is only on that one moment, because all you want to do is get rid of that one thing.

With this in mind, these are the design principles of TrashySF:

• Speed
• Simplicity
• Accuracy

It has to be fast or else you would not want to make a time investment to use it (because you already are using it to throw things out faster). If it’s not simple to use, why bother? And finally, if it doesn’t give you the right answer, you won’t trust it.

This is the premise of TrashySF. I am going to continue to document how the project evolves on this blog and you can also check out the live prototype.