Many years ago before indoor plumbing people carried their “night soil” outside to the honey man who picked it up and disposed of it. We do the same thing today with rubbish. Sometimes we call it trash, or garbage. There are personal costs, hygiene issues and time involved with the current systems we have to remove waste from our homes. But we tolerate it. Add in the complications involved with recycling and the societal costs become astronomical. There may be a solution.This trash can has an electric lid with a sensor that opens it when you want to use it. Imagine if it also had a crusher/grinder that macerated everything that was put into it. Imagine further that it was connected to a drain so that the slurry it created was sent on down the drain. Suddenly there is no garbage to bag or recyclables to sort. In your modern kitchen you put your trash in a hole and it goes away. It is like a garbage disposal on steroids.

But you say won’t this clog the sewer pipes and overwhelm the sewerage treatment plants? Probably old systems would have to be rebuilt but the advantage to the residents of places with piped trash would be as much as those that accrued to people who got on the new sewer utilities in the Victorian era.

How can it start? New subdivisions for rich people would be an ideal place. The owners can afford to pay for this new luxury good and it would give the developers a competitive advantage. The slurry can be sorted by machines as the volume begins to build so it would do a better job of recycling than the householder dependent system we have now.