January 2019 ♪♪♪
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Chester (Cheshire, England) is a lovely beautiful city with a walled cathedral, located in the North West of England. I went to there to research a Japanese global manufacturer on January 2019. As the central of Chester is the near the Welsh border (where I resided), I was able to do day trips to the Deeside Industrial Park located in Northern Wales in a matter of tens minutes, each way, by car. Chester was founded in around 80 AD and has some historic stories, the details of which are beyond the objective of this article.
A clock tower is the centre piece of this walled city in the shopping district. An ashtray was attached from outside of the litter bin. There was a convenient drawer with a knob, which displayed a catchphrase “extinguish your cigarette here”. There are some litter bins of the same type in the central district, I think that is the reason why there are few cigarette butts on the ground.
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I found the logo of “BigBelly Solar” in the litter bin in the shopping district. Bigbelly (Massachusetts, USA) is a company which aims to offer smart waste and recycling solutions, and has provided smart litter bins all over the world. It was originally founded as Seahorse Power in 2003. The litter bins have an interesting function that provides notification of its litter volume and garbage compression. This function is supported by a solar powered battery.
The upper solar cell of the bin generates electricity. Using the electricity, the quantity of the internal garbage will be notified to the host via a mobile phone network. Thus, it will be possible to render some useful effect for recycling, for example searching an effective collection route. The firm can also gather and analyses cloud data to identify high-use locations for the installation of these smart bins. As I remember, this notification system has been implemented since the middle of 2010s in Japan. Anyway, it is far from cheap, probably hundreds of thousands of yen per a bin, but I think it is very useful and amazing product.
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When I was not busy observing bins, I searched for good cuisines. During our visit to Chester, two of us dined at La Fattoria (CH1 1RS) and had a lovely dish of calamari with Peroni. The batter was crisp and savoury. We appreciated the hospitality of the cuisine.
See you soon in next issue!
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