MIT project uses RF tags to trace routes of trash

MIT's Senseable City Lab is using RF tags embedded in trash to trace the trash's downstream journey to landfills. This New York Times article describes just how complicated it can be to trace the path of trash once it leaves the trashcan. The routes various pieces take seem to be sometimes random and unpredictable, suggesting a kind of logic that is at once mysterious and surpassing even the knowledge of the engineers who design the system in the first place.