[SEATTLE, WA 01.04.2015 00:01 april fools] MIT Sendable City lab announced today that a study with NGO Basel Acting Network has revealed a startling outcome, and a next stage. The circular economy is flat. And a Next Generation Tracking Devices has been developed to find reuse trade as it occurs.
The team will keep tracking the devices, as they move around between repair and reuse markets. But the next generation of trackers, the NI88ERGPS, will clearly identify boundries in the gray market.
"In our first effort, we thought that Basel Acting Network had tracked each of the GPS devices to its final resting place. We called that end point 'Overseas'. We thought we were finished," said Dr. Carl Ratty of MIT Sendable City Lab. "It turns out there are a lot of different places over there, and stuff keeps moving around."
The 1st Generation of GPS devices are still in motion. 88 different nations have continued to use, pass along, and exchange the devices. Reuse is spiralling out of control, and it will take a new generation of trackers to make the crime - not disposal, but point of exchange - more black and white.
A 'point of pollution' requires that the device stop somewhere, in a dump. BAN's actual target is the exchange of goods and services between rich and poor, an act he labels electronic miscegenation. These are not geographic "positioning" tracers. They will trace "possession".
Continuing Final Outcomes:
"In 2016, we were certain that when the GPS devices landed in Faisalabad, Pakistan, that they were surely and finally buried, deep in the soil of a 3rd story electronics mall with escalators and dozens of reuse shops," said Basel Acting Network CEO Jim Plunckett.
But the first trial continued to track the property for as long as the batteries last. Devices disposed in a primitive computer company's third shelf eye-level retail shop moved to a dormitory at Faisalabad University, 3 blocks away.
"We updated the report to show the devices new locations. But they keep moving," said Ratty.
Devices sent to Tin Shui Wai in Hong Kong's Yuen Long district could be tracked going up an elevator, the a 14 floor apartment. One device appeared to be in use in a hospital mobile cart. A display device attached to a blood gas analyzer, the GPS tracker showed the cart moving up and down hallways, floor by floor in the Cairo General Childrens Hospital.
Plunckett sees a better solution than tracking an "end point".
The team will keep tracking the devices, as they move around between repair and reuse markets. But the next generation of trackers, the NI88ERGPS, will clearly identify boundries in the gray market.
The 1st Generation of GPS devices are still in motion. 88 different nations have continued to use, pass along, and exchange the devices. Reuse is spiralling out of control, and it will take a new generation of trackers to make the crime - not disposal, but point of exchange - more black and white.
A 'point of pollution' requires that the device stop somewhere, in a dump. BAN's actual target is the exchange of goods and services between rich and poor, an act he labels electronic miscegenation. These are not geographic "positioning" tracers. They will trace "possession".
Continuing Final Outcomes:
"In 2016, we were certain that when the GPS devices landed in Faisalabad, Pakistan, that they were surely and finally buried, deep in the soil of a 3rd story electronics mall with escalators and dozens of reuse shops," said Basel Acting Network CEO Jim Plunckett.
But the first trial continued to track the property for as long as the batteries last. Devices disposed in a primitive computer company's third shelf eye-level retail shop moved to a dormitory at Faisalabad University, 3 blocks away.
"We updated the report to show the devices new locations. But they keep moving," said Ratty.
Devices sent to Tin Shui Wai in Hong Kong's Yuen Long district could be tracked going up an elevator, the a 14 floor apartment. One device appeared to be in use in a hospital mobile cart. A display device attached to a blood gas analyzer, the GPS tracker showed the cart moving up and down hallways, floor by floor in the Cairo General Childrens Hospital.
Plunckett sees a better solution than tracking an "end point".
