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Smart Trash may sound like an oxymoron but, if my friend Dr. Valerie Thomas has her way, it will be the term that transforms e-waste from a costly problem to a profit center. The basic idea behind Smart Trash is simple – equip every product with a way to provide enough information about itself to enable efficient automated sorting and recycling. Dr. Thomas came up with this idea several years ago while she was teaching at Princeton University (she’s now at  Georgia Tech) but it may have finally gotten the recognition it deserves when it was mentioned in a  recent New York Times Magazine story about the most promising technologies of 2009.Making items like batteries or cell phones more cost-effective to recycle can be as simple as placing a durable bar code in an inconspicuous spot on its case or embedding an inexpensive RFID tag. The label or tag would contain information about the product’s make, model and configuration which could be quickly read by a scanner when it arrives at a...

CTV, the official video carrier in Canada for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, has reported that  two-thirds of Canadian households watched the Opening Ceremonies last night. Twenty-three million people, as an audience, if that is the case, exceeds that of any viewing in Canada’s TV history.Parts of the ceremonies were not as spectacular as, perhaps, the incredible start to the Beijing summer games has now led us to expect in such events. But after the elongated acknowledgments to the First Nations on whose lands the events were being held, the sight of a snow boarder coming out from the second story to land in the center of BC Place’s auditorium was a welcome start.We then had the amazing rising of Spirit Bear from the floor, a huge marionette that seemed to move under its own power. The floor then turned into various forms of ocean and rivers with rising trees that seemed to self-immolate into nothing. But, undoubtedly, the most spectacular video image was that of orcas – our hu...