A group of urban researchers and environmental scientists wants to get inside your garbage can and follow your rubbish for a ride around town.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s SENSEable City lab are curious about the patterns and costs of urban waste disposal, so they have embarked on a project worthy of a spot on Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs — placing tiny smart tags on 3,000 pieces of trash to track movement from garbage can to final resting place.

“I think people will be curious to find out how their objects move through cities,” SENSEable City Lab Director Carlo Ratti told OhMyGov.

On Thursday night, the preliminary results where unveiled at the Architectural League in New York.

The voyages of some of the 500 pieces of trash tagged in Seattle and 50 in New York were shown on grayscale maps of the two cities, projected onto a rectangular screen. The movements of the tagged trash were illustrated as visual paths superimposed on satellite images of the cities. A header defined the piece of trash in question, for example a Starbucks cup, and a timeline showed a “present” point moving steadily.

The Trash Track project is intended to “reveal the disposal process of our everyday objects,” Ratti said.

The experiment, funded by Waste Management, Inc., tagged rubbish in New York, Seattle and jolly old London. Not only is there a curiosity factor in what happens to our discarded items, but for participants and observers, it spurs thinking about what is thrown out and how that impacts the environment.

“This might even prompt behavioral changes about the way people dispose of their waste,” said Ratti in the interview.

For municipal governments, the project may reveal patterns that will be useful for plotting future trash pick-up routes and otherwise minimizing the waste of waste.

The exhibits of Trash Track data cleverly display the distance traveled over time; for instance, a computer tower has logged the marathon distance of 26 miles by day 7 of its journey. Yellow dots superimposed on the map indicated how long a given piece of trash spent at any given location. Where a piece of rubbish stops moving, the circle begins to expand, letting you know it sat there for a while. The longer the wait, the bigger the circle, which is connected to other points in the path by lines to show the entire track of the trash item.

Ratti and team had to think outside the discarded box in designing the experiment. Because traditional GPS requires a direct line-of-sight with satellites, and radio frequency identification needs scanners nearby, the team had to develop its own markers to do the job.

The MIT researchers opted to use cellular phone technology to enable its smart tags to communicate with a central server. The tags, encased in a protective waterproof resin to help battle the “juices” commonly found in waste environments, broadcast their location to the server via the abundant cell phone towers that, um, decorate the cities. The location of each piece of trash was triangulated by measuring the differences in signal strength among the towers.

Another obstacle to tackle was battery life. Again, researchers got all MacGyver with the problem and decided to use a fine-grain motion sensor that currently lasts up to two months on a single charge.

"Our tags are similar to a small cell phone, but have no keyboard or screen,” said Kristian Kloeckl, one of the project's leaders.

Waste Management is also very interested in the results, as it looks for ways to optimize its own collection and waste processing methods.

“We hope that when the results are analyzed, we will see ways to improve the logistics of waste — from our trucks, to our recycling, to our disposal systems,” said Carl Rush, the company’s VP of Organic Growth.

Viewing the exhibit, it is readily apparent that trash frequently (and inexplicably) doubles back and forth between waste storage facilities, and actually travels a lot farther than you’d think. To see a few of the data maps, go here: http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack/press.php?id=5

The New York exhibit runs until November 7. But the trash will be around a while longer.