If you look around in any large city you’ll quickly notice that we’re almost drowning in waste. Not just the obvious trash that goes into bins and gets landfilled every week, but also food, furniture and clothing, we throw out such a lot it’s embarrassing. Especially when so many others have so little.
Trashswag is an attempt to redress the balance, by helping people locate and retrieve waste and turn it into something useful – something reused, repaired or recycled. The whole system is basically a website with a mobile app, which you can download on your Android or iPhone. When you spot something that’s been thrown away, you take a snap and post it to the map for others to see, in case they have a use for it.
The main categories cover things like wooden furniture, salvage materials for building, old pianos, sinks etc, so it won’t handle clothes, food or other miscellany like that, but it’s still a pretty useful resource. Unfortunately the site itself doesn’t work as well as it might, and stalls occasionally, but that’s to be expected from a free service, and the Android app looks to be fairly well broken as well, although the iPhone app looks to be fine.
Here’s hoping the whole thing gets some more development love soon.