Where does that empty bottle end up?

A plastic soap bottle tossed in a Manhattan recycling bin took several twists and turns around the city before crossing the river to Kearny, N.J. So, who has been following the trash? No one, but a simple tracking device. A 5-year-old group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spent the last year attaching thousands of tracking devices to pieces of garbage in Seattle and New York City. The devices send out pulses to signal where they are. The signals go to MIT's SENSEable City Lab for analysis.

Most cities today face problems of congestion, pollution and inefficiency problems. New technologies, like iPhones, social networking and wireless communication, can inform city dwellers and make cities "smarter."

The aim of project "Trash Track" is to study where recyclables go. As the world consumes at a faster rate than ever before, it becomes important to track trash, and see how it degrades, if at all it does.

Trash companies follow their own haul, for example. But once they separate the aluminum and sell it to a collector, their records end. No single database tracks a soda can through its cycle. Trash Track may be a useful tool with e-waste too.

But of course this calls for coordination and acting together based on the inputs from the tracking.

Or else the power of networks in general and the Internet will simply be an exercise in showing the many things that “can be done” but don’t get done!