How's this for a project, 2 DC brushless motors, a mounted solar panel on top of the trash/rubbish bin, tucked away somewhere a 12v small 7A/h battery which the solar panel charges, right then, the hard part
a metal rail, depending on how far you wish to go, embedded into concrete..
The bin has an Ardino, it knows what the time and date is, and when it's the bins time to need to be emptied, it turns on it's motors and slowly goes down the rail to the path to the side of the road, a latch relay triggers off and pulls a pin out allowing the rubbish truck to pick up the bin (either using a tilt sensor or accelerometer, or simply select a time you know it will be empty by 9am, 12pm, or once it gets picked up into the air and placed back down again ...
The other tricky part is guiding the bin back onto the rail if the pickup truck does not place it back exactly how it should be....maybe some kind of hall sensor, 2 of them to detect where it needs to move to so it can lock in and guide it's way back to base bin station lol... bluetooth/wifi support, place it out on demand, wet, rain, whatever, never miss it! give it an IP address and check to see if your bin got emptied lol
So then who want's to build one? 