Reported a couple of days ago. The London Financial District will get about 100 new Trash Bins (also called Recycling Bins in the report) under a 21 year contract. The first 50 of the new bins are to appear soon. The bins are claimed to cost $30,000 each, which the manufacturer well cover - due to the much better grade of trash generated in the Financial District(?) ... ... or something.

The Report:

Recycling bins with LCD screens hit London's streets

By John Roach
18 Feb 20123

The trash can is getting an upgrade. Instead of a just a receptacle for recyclable rubbish, new models hitting London's streets feature LCD screens that display breaking news, stock quotes, emergency alerts, and, naturally, advertisements.

What's more, the high-tech bins are made of a material that is reportedly four times stronger than steel, a feature that could thwart attempts to use them as a place to plant bombs.

Renew, the company behind the functional billboards, aims to deploy a network of 100 bins in London's financial district by this summer, providing advertisers the opportunity to catch the eyeballs of deep-pocketed consumers as they pop out of the office for a spot of tea.
The company inked a 21-year contract with London in part because the bins' toughness is a solution to clean up streets littered with papers handed out on street corners. Standard trash cans are discouraged in the city due to terrorist threats.

In case an emergency occurs, the bin network is equipped with instant-messaging capabilities that allow delivery of updates directly from civil authorities, allowing increased public awareness.

Each bin costs about $30,000, a hefty sum that Renew eats in order to sell content providers access to the LCD screens.

According to the company's studies, the current rollout of 50 screens is sufficient to engage a financial district worker a minimum of six times per day.

Renew also markets the receptacles as environmentally friendly. The screens have what's called adaptive brightness technology that they claim is energy-sipping instead of guzzling. In addition, Renew says it will donate 1 percent of profits to sustainable energy projects for world cities.

While the planet might be better off without any energy-sipping billboards, at least London's streets will be cleaner and its workers more engaged with advertisers.

[End of the report.]

In another report that appeared a couple of hours ago, that appears to be a rehash of prior news:

[Report 2]

Report: UK anti-terror plan to sweep up email, phone, online records

By msnbc.com staff

Data on all phone calls, text messages, email traffic and online visits would be stored for a year in vast databases under a new anti-terrorism plan in Britain, The Telegraph reported Saturday on its website.

The report, which did not cite sources, said that phone companies and broadband providers would be ordered to store the information themselves for a year for security services' "real-time" inspection under the plan. Contents of phone calls, texts or emails would not be recorded, The Telegraph said, but the databases would retain the phone numbers and email addresses sent from and to.

And the plan would reach into social networking for the first time, The Telegraph reported, allowing security services to get information about direct messages between users of Facebook, Twitter and similar sites, and even between players in online video games.

The Telegraph said the government had been negotiating with Internet companies for two months and the plan could be announced as early as May.

The newspaper noted that there could be concerns over civil liberties issues and over the security of the records themselves.

It wasn't clear if the plan applied only to domestic communications or whether international calls, texts and tweets would be swept up in the databases. The newspaper described the plan as a reworking of a proposal abandoned in 2009 by the previous Labour government amid a storm of criticism.

[End of Report 2]

Isn't this one dejaphooey or something.

Maybe it's resurfaced because they're thinking the bins might be a good place to store all the sh*t they collect(?)

John