What’s a retired girl robot to do?

Why, track trash, of course! Come hear what she has to tell us about where our garbage really goes this Saturday at Central Library.

Little did Kirsten Rooks’s science students at Lake Washington Girls Middle School know when they built a solar robot last year that she would find meaningful retirement work as, well…trash.

Last week as part of an MIT study, the school’s “she-bot” was one of some 3,000 other pieces of garbage fitted with electronic smart-tags and ceremonially tossed into ordinary garbage cans.

Using the cell-phone technology in her tag, LWGMS’s “she-bot” has been faithfully reporting her whereabouts back to MIT computers, allowing researchers to monitor the journey from garbage can to landfill in real time.






This Saturday, September 19, you are invited to Central Library (1000 4th Ave) from 11am-12:30pm to hear all about her amazing journey.

Why should we care where our garbage goes? Because there’s a lot of it—almost 400,000 tons of waste, yearly, from Seattle alone—and because we don’t know nearly as much about the “removal chain” as we do the “supply chain.” Gaining more information about the waste stream will not only help us build more sustainable infrastructures, it could foster real behavioral change. If you know exactly how long a drive that Starbucks cup has to take in order to become landfill…you may just think twice before tossing.

That’s what the folks from MIT’s “Trash Track Team” believe, anyway. And that’s why they’re tracking trash in two cities— New York and Seattle—this fall.
As for the Lake Washington Girls Middle School “she-bot”…well, until Saturday she remains persistently unavailable for public comment. A source close to her, however—Lake Washington Girls Middle School Head of School Patricia Hearn—notes that the “she-bot’s” Trash Track is just one part of a much larger environmental campaign the young female environmentalists at Lake Washington Girls Middle School are taking on this year.

“Lake Washington Girls Middle School is proud to participate as one of just a handful of ‘Washington Green Schools’—schools that work intentionally to eliminate waste and to undergo voluntary waste audits in order to educate more sustainably,” says Hearn. “Our involvement with Trash Track is one part of this new campaign, and we couldn’t be more excited to hear what our ‘she-bot’ has to teach us!”

Please join us Saturday to find out!

Update! Read the New York Times article about the trash tracking project.