I was both impressed and proud to read Rob Walker's "Consumed" column in the NYT magazine which discussed the thesis of Indhira Rojas, a graduate student in design at the California College of the Arts, which I attended.
Rojas thesis revolves around a proposed system, IndexR, that would track a consumer's purchases via barcode in order to provide the consumer with information pertaining to the proper recycling and/or disposal of said purchases at the end of their life cycle in order to "create efficiency in the waste stream." While IndexR exists in theoretical form for the time being, Walker argues that since consumer behavior is already gathered for the benefit of companies wishing to sell us more stuff, it shouldn't be preposterous for consumers themselves to access the same data for other, perhaps more benevolent, ends. Read more here.