Uneven terrain rumbled the chasis of the automated truck. Once, a diesel electric powertrain. Now the sounds hydraualics only. The sound of screeching, eager to be replaced brakes replaced by whirring dynamos and air resistance.
The truck's livery was plain, a light weight frame defying its purpose. Start. Stop. Collect. Start. Stop. Collect. It visited every home, once a week, ceaseless. A neighbourhood santa, persistent in the mists of early winter, and the scorching rays of summer.
A fleet crisscrossed the city, and dumped their contents into what was no longer called the dump, but the site now known as the urban mine, where every shred of household waste was carefully inspected for reuse, raw resource value, or wether it should be converted to eletrical energy to enable the truck's next jaunt.
In a way, the trucks were collecting their own energy. Not as mobile furnances, but as a system of resource collection. Several thousand drivers lost their jobs in this city alone. They were offered lower pay, in sorting through the content of the trucks, but this was only temporary until the machines could do that too.
The embodied energy in waste has value. Each and every other shred of the supply chain knew this, and little as possible is wasted in the factory, and every and each object placed into the rubbish represented an under-capitalised expense.
But what of the entropic effects of the trucks themselves on the road? What of their tyres when they have worn themselves to pieces, and the street sweepers have collected the tiny marbles of rubber left in the gutter, to be reconstituted anew?
Where there was once four trucks, there became three. Then two. Then one. In an optimistic world, trash day is a memory of a rush to offload and dispose. In this world, piles of debris and matter represent progress. Replacement. Upgrades.
Throw away less, use existing items more. Shut down the new urban mines by finding the sovereign value in your own waste. If someone else is to use it to extract value, why not let it be you?
The perhaps decentralisation of garbage collection and resource recovery is the next step in this tale of trucks, but until atomic-level deconstruction can strip objects down to their core elemental particles for reuse and synthesis, we'll still have piles of decomposing matter chaperoned through the city to the dump.
Some may become soil, most become wasteful toxin. If you don't need to use it at all, don't use it all.
