Bridgeport gets solar trash bins

Bridgeport, Conn (WTNH) - Bridgeport is celebrating Earth Day in a high-tech way by harnessing the power of the sun to help please mother nature.

The city has gone high-tech with solar-powered garbage bins. There's actually a trash compactor inside. The idea? To eliminate waste in waste elimination.

"Trash builds up, breaks the electric eye, and tells it it should do a compaction," said Rick Gaudette of Big Belly Solar.

Gaudette walked Mayor Bill Finch, and members of the City Public Works Department, through the ins and outs of the new solar-powered trash compactor garbage cans.

The idea is to have a lot more ins than outs. In other words, by compacting the trash in the bins, you cut down the need to empty them by as much as 80-percent.

"Instead of sending men and women out from our public works department, 3, 4, 5, 6 times, they only have to go once. So that's less pollution, less trucks, less trips, and those workers can be taking better care of our parks and doing other things that are a lot more productive than picking up garbage," Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch said.

As a way to kick off Earth Day, the City of Bridgeport is placing six of the combination garbage and recycling units around downtown. They were paid for with Federal Stimulus funds, and as gas prices keep going higher and higher, the bins are not only a gift to the planet, they're a gift to the taxpayers. They could pay for themselves in about two years.

"It costs on average about $2,000 a can to empty it. So, these units here run about $4,000, so in a relatively short period of time, you can break even," Gaudette said.

If this experiment goes well, Mayor Finch says he would like to add more bins, especially in popular places like Seaside and Beardsley Parks.