Trash City, USA

From the lovely Washington news source, WTOP News, we have an apparent AP article that was published in the Washington Times. Here's the intro:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Sporting a used toy box, a few Christmas ornaments and a Discovery credit card, a model of Augua Nova hardly looks like a city of tomorrow. But for Loudoun County middle school students Daniel Aldana, Thomas Martin and Sophia Folena, that's the point.

"We want to see the potential in what we throw out," said Daniel, 13, as he and his colleagues presented their model utopia on Jan. 24 at the National Engineers Week Future City event at the University of the District of Columbia. "In the future, it might be that what we view as waste could be used to build a city."

At first, I was wondering what the hell a Discovery credit card was, to then realize it was a typo. But that's not really important for this piece, rather I was intrigued by the idea of building the city of tomorrow out of trash.

These kids are pretty creative,

The recycled metropolis, built on a 2-foot by 3-foot base of plywood, includes skyscrapers, a stadium, an industrial zone and even a water desalination plant.

"I'd say 95 percent of everything in the city is recycled, just things we gathered from trash and stuff that would normally be thrown out," said Sophia, 14.

The kids also used Sim City 4 to determine if the design of their city would be sustainable.

Now the interesting part is that the competition was held in a city that's already made out of nearly 100% trash. We don't yet have skyscrapers, but we did recently finish construction on a $611+ million dollar stadium, built completely out of garbage AND hosting the nation's first baseball team actually comprised of compost material.

Now we just need to convince those fat cats down at the Wilson Building to invest in a few copies of Sim City 4. We'll just have to convince Maxis to add "Inauguration" and "Snow Flurry" options to the disasters menu.