NYC could really use these. Such a brilliant, simple idea.

unconsumption:

Public Trash Cans That Aren’t Overflowing with Empty Coffee Cups - Design - The Atlantic Cities:

Copenhagen designer So Hoj noticed, and was bothered by, piles of spent coffee cups spilling out of trash cans and onto the sidewalk around the city. 

Hoj, a self-employed designer with a background in accessories, took up the problem herself by converting tall, slender cardboard tubes from the post office into receptacles for discarded cups.

The idea is simple enough: you can hold more cups in a smaller space when they’re stacked neatly inside each other. Hoj’s theory was that this would alleviate the cup problem by giving them their own, more compact space, and leaving larger trash cans for other items.

…

She mounted her “test tube” cup collectors and put them on two trash cans along the waterfront. Quickly, her fellow Copenhageners caught on.

Here’s what the trash cans used to look like before her solution:

Beaches: the world’s largest ashtrays.

thisbigcity:

Mexico City’s last landfill is full. Where can the trash go now? More on This Big City.

Even climate change skeptics can’t deny the massive problem of society’s ingrained “take-make-waste” economy. 

Chris Jordan, Running the Numbers

“…2.4 million plastic bottles, equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world’s oceans every hour. 

All of the plastic used to compose this work was collected from the Pacific Ocean.”

This is both inspiring and terrifying.