Garbage collection via pneumatic tubes
qz.comI highly doubt this is the future of garbage collection, because it involves massive infrastructure investment that only pays itself in decades. This is not how local politics and budgeting operates. (source: I'm a district councilor in a large European capital)
By the time these system are deployed, we may as well have ubiquitous autonomous vehicles. In that scenario, instead of having large garbage trucks with people hauling the bins around, buildings could be retrofitted with autonomous garbage ports served by a fleet of small automated vehicles. The sorting would be done on site by the building and then the right vehicle stops by and picks up say recyclables when the on-site storage reaches the limit.
So from the users' perspective, you have the same pneumatic tube, sorting, incentivizing payment system etc. as discussed in the article. But the capital investments are much smaller, any building can install the automated chute and the system could use the existing road network without digging up thousands of miles of street.
> I highly doubt this is the future of garbage collection, because it involves massive infrastructure investment that only pays itself in decades.
So do sewage networks, but nevertheless nowadays it's unthinkable to consider any urban area without one.
To me this reads like a sewage network that doesn't rely on gravity acting on a fluid to operate.
Even sewage, which is less complex, only makes sense in dense areas. Many homes have septic tanks.
Which is why we have sewage systems in dense areas and septic systems in rural areas.
> Even sewage, which is less complex, only makes sense in dense areas.
That's ok, as over half of all mankind lives in dense urban centers.
Large investments will be made if they have large impacts on the short run. A city lacking sewage will devolve into chaos and be quickly deserted. In the case of garbage, you already have a working system, so you are looking at an efficiency improvement, not a fundamental benefit.
Why devote a completely new underground infrastructure for a specialized transport task, when you already have one that is generic and also applies to transport of people, freight etc.? The efficiency improvements don't make it sufficiently compelling, like for example the natural gas infrastructure, it's not like you could haul it around in trucks or like it can share transport infrastructure with electricity. Garbage is just a solid transport task, use the solid transport infra.
> for example the natural gas infrastructure, it's not like you could haul it around in trucks
In most of the US that is, in fact, how gas is supplied to homes. Each home has their own tank. Only denser areas have gas pipelines to the home.
Don't the trucks typically haul propane? Natural gas is impractical to store at home because it's only liquid at cryogenic temperatures.
Still, it's coherent with GP's point: LPG and NG have the same finality, they get burned for energy in the same boilers with minimal changes.
In dense areas, the capital expenses of dedicated infrastructure are recouped with cheaper gas price, in sparse areas, we fall back on a more expensive fuel that can be transported on the existing generic infrastructure.
So the question than becomes: how dense do we need to get before dedicated garbage pipes make sense. Seems much, much more capital intensive than gas lines.
Sewage is a pretty fundamental quality of life improvement. Much more than convenient garbage collection.
Let’s instead compare to fiber internet. It requires a tiny glass thread to be run, not a huge pipe, and it’s still really expensive and not done most places.
The problem that garbage collection addresses is not lack of convenience.
What sewers do for non-solid waste, garbage collectors do for solid waste.
Did you do the math on whether that's actually a smaller investment? Large autonomous vehicle fleets sound like a big investment even if one eventually gets developed. Plus it will cause road congestion. Which would cause the need for more infrastructure investment down the line. Not that these pipes aren't expensive but at least it's proven technology that's available on the market. According to the article, Nairobi, Kenya is going to use it. That's not a rich place. I think you therefore might be overestimating the cost.
The average garbage production per capita in the US is 5 pounds per day. Moving that quantity a few miles to a collection center is completely trivial to other transportation tasks that an average citizen needs every day (personal travel for work, shopping, leisure and social tasks, freight transport and home delivery, the average effect of constructing, repairing and tearing down buildings etc. etc.). So it is unlikely to have any effect on congestion.
OTOH we already do this with water and sewage in dense areas. These could be replaced with vehicles and tanks if it's cheaper in the future.
In rural areas, one can often encounter off-grid houses disconnected from the central sewage system. They have to get regular visits from trucks that pump it off. Sometimes smaller villages have a central sewage collection site but digging a pipe to the next treatment plant would be too expensive so the truck visits that one collection site and doesn't have to collect from multiple tanks.
This isn't entirely true. Rural properties have septic tanks that are maintenance free for years at a time. The waste is digested by bacteria in the tank and effluents runs off into a septic field. The tank is pumped out only when there is a substantial amount of undigested sludge filling the tank.
Depending pn usage, septic tanks can sometimes go 20 years before being pumped. My house has heavy usage (lots of people), so it gets pumped every 2 years or so. It could maybe go longer, but it's not worth risking it getting over-filled.
You're just stating that off grid houses are off grid. What's your point exactly?
It’s over 1/5 of homes in the US that aren’t connected to a public sewer system. That’s quite a bit more than what most people would interpret as “off grid”.
That means 4/5th are “on grid” for sewer. Solving a problem for 80% of the country seems good. Though it sounds like this tube system is economical for less than sewer.
In a lot of new cities, they just have waste trucks that go to buildings and collect the waste daily. Not ideal, but long term infrastructure investments aren't always possible
> I highly doubt this is the future of garbage collection, because it involves massive infrastructure investment that only pays itself in decades. This is not how local politics and budgeting operates. (source: I'm a district councilor in a large European capital)
Mostly, yes. But large, long, capital intensive investments occasionally do get pulled off. See eg the New York subway.
Different places have different abilities and willingness to do so. Similar for the same place in different times.
How likely is it do you think that New York's subway could be built today? They seem to be having trouble just upgrading the existing lines.
Unlikely, but I have no special insight.
Many countries in the Anglosphere (US, UK, Australia) seem to have lost their ability to pull off big infrastructure projects.
I don't think London could build their sewers today either, nor their tube system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_sewerage_system#History
I'm glad to be living in Singapore where that kind of building capacity is still alive. They are currently building multiple new underground train lines. Driverless, of course.
For an intermediate between bins and a full vacuum network, there's: https://www.molok.com
Or an underground rail system where a cart will pause under a bin and triggers a chute under the garbage bin to open and drop its contents down into the cart. The cart would then continue onto the next bin and so on until the cart is full, which it would then go drop off its load to a larger cart on a mainline before going back and continuing pickups.
What exactly do you do day to day as district councilor? Is your life mostly reacting to issues, or can you design/institute new programs/change?
I'm in the opposition and mostly react to proposals from the executive, the mayors' team, drafts of bills and projects. I can have legislative initiative but to impact meaningful change in a modern city you need to have a very well prepared and technical project.
So complex projects like what we discuss here will always be done though the executive, hey have the technical expertise and resources to plan it. They would do that only for projects that are likely to pass and have the mayors' support.
I doubt it too, but not for the reasons you mention. It works only with disciplined and responsible people. We had a few of them since the 80ies, none of them are in operation anymore to my knowledge. Because the people abused them, which led to many service interruptions, expensive repairs, and so on. Maybe in some future upper class condominiums like in Elysium, with properly trained and well behaved Eloys, but not here on Earth :)
edit: partial translation of https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abfallsauganlage by courtesy of DeepL:
Waste suction plant in Bonn-Tannenbusch
This plant has been shut down since 1 January 2010. Since the beginning of the 1970s, it has served up to 12,000 inhabitants of the Bonn-(Neu-)Tannenbusch district for waste disposal. It was the largest waste suction plant in the world. It comprised a suction pipe network of about 12 kilometers in length and 200 insertion shafts (100 permanently installed in the multi-story apartment buildings and high-rise buildings, 100 outdoors) [12].
In 1991, the German Packaging Ordinance came into force. After the introduction of the yellow garbage cans and the yellow garbage bags for packaging waste, the Tannenbuscher plant was only meant to collect the so-called residual waste.
During the approx. 40 years of its operation, approx. 50.000 tons of household waste were disposed of with this waste suction plant. With a transport speed of approx. 90 km/h garbage bags or loose waste was transported to a collection point in the industrial park "Hohe Straße". From there, the transport route continued by container and truck to the waste incineration plant in Bonn-Endenich.
Misuse and damage have made this form of waste disposal increasingly expensive and not very environmentally friendly. Even hazardous waste and slaughterhouse waste from private households reached the plant and had to be salvaged at great expense. In addition, heavy objects that were also thrown in by mistake damaged the underground pipelines and tore holes in their walls.
In most cases, these damages could not be detected and repaired in time, so that large amounts of soil were sucked in at various points by the operation of the suction blower. The resulting cavities under the earth's surface sometimes caused damage to overlying roadways and other surfaces. The danger of a break-in, which could cause damage to buildings or even people, caused the responsible authorities to stop the operation of the Tannenbuscher waste suction plant.
In March 2007, the city council of the Federal City of Bonn decided to shut down the waste suction plant from autumn 2009. Several filling shafts were closed ahead of schedule, the last of them at the turn of the year 2009/2010. A dismantling of the plant is planned. [13] The dismantling of the plant cost about 1.5 million Euros, [14] for the entire dismantling of the plant, i.e. the filling of the pipelines and the demolition of the 150 filling stations, the head of the environment department had given an estimate of 4 million Euros in advance. [15]
I don't understand how pneumatic tubes may be used to reclaim memory.
Baker can lay the groundwork for you:
https://web.archive.org/web/20171207154321/http://www.pipeli...
Once you have a basic grasp of how to use thermodynamic statistical analysis to understand memory pressure (and other compute pressures), you can probably see how tubes could be helpful here.
:)
Garbage collection is not a big truck. It's a series of tubes!
'pneumatic tubes' here refers to an algorithm developed by BigTech(TM), with the paper on PTA (pneumatic tubes algorithm) coming out any minute now.
When the memory needs to be disposed of you drop it in the tube.
> I don't understand how pneumatic tubes may be used to reclaim memory.
Yep, I thought the same thing when I read the title.
I lived in a tower block in the UK few decades back (was built in the 60's) and it had a shoot system comparable to this. Was bad as you would get people putting oversized rubbish down it so would get stuck in the shaft. Would also collect `matter` so would have a smell in the summer that permeated up the tube and whilst good in principle, in practice - not suited or accommodating towards a recycle culture.
Making general waste easier to dispose of IMHO only distracts/dissuaded people from recycling based upon my observations. More so in building types I described, to recycle you have to walk down to the ground floor to access a locked bin area to place your recycling into separate bins. Or as many did - just dump it down the one shoot for all the rubbish.
Ages ago in Poland we had those chutes as well in big apartment buildings. On top of the smell, there were also impossible-to-eradicate ants and cockroaches living in those chutes. They were eventually locked. I wonder how the pneumatic tunes deal with the pest problem.
Recycling is dead anyway.
https://www.nrpa.org/parks-recreation-magazine/2019/april/re...
Huh? Recycling appears to be alive and well in New York City at least. It's even all processed locally, next door in New Jersey.
What percentage of plastic actually gets recycled since China stopped accepted our trash?
As far as I know, all of it. NYC never sent anything to China in the first place. It's all recycled locally by Sims, as it has been long before anything China did in the past few years:
https://www.simsmunicipal.com/
They have a long-term (and exclusive, I believe) contract with the city.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/nyregion/nyc-recycling.ht...
You’re right though, NYC is less affected by the change in Chinese policy..
Add separate recycling chutes and it may look very different.
You don't need separate chutes for e.g. PET and metals; they're easily sorted afterwards.
If beer residue doesn't make paper non-recyclable, you can chuck paper and cardboard into the same chute too, and now you have one chute for the major recyclables and one for trash that gets burned.
The article mentions 3 chutes for different materials.
A better model would really be a low-waste lifestyle and compostable packaging/materials. Greatly reduce the amount of items that are thrown away and provide community compost sites for the packing materials. Pickup interval of regular trash could be reduced to once every 1 to 3 months.
community compost sites
Yeah, right. You want to live next to one? The manager of the barn where I keep my horse has the problem that the non-rural types who have moved in next door don't like the manure pile. And if you think manure has enough value that someone will haul it away for free, you're wrong.
Our food waste has been collected for more than a decade now. Once a year we can go and collect free compost from the council. It works in other parts of the world.
In my part of the world, we don't have counties: all land is incorporated into one commune/comune/Gemeinde or another.
In practice, this means that the community compost is usually situated well away from residential zones.
I totally would not mind living next door to a community compost pile - in fact, there is one round the corner, but it’s mostly used for garden waste from the parks around here. But a well managed compost pile has no negative side effects. It might smell a little like hay from time to time, but it’s definitely not even remotely comparable to a manure pile.
Really? Around here people charge money for horse manure.
Also, a community compost heap need not resemble a manure pile.
Composted manure has value and no objectionable smell.
Fresh from the horse hot solids have the opposite of both of those qualities.
It takes time and biological action to turn the second into the first. The manure pile bears little resemblance to what comes out of the bag you buy at the home center or farm store.
Of course, I have zero sympathy for folks who move in next to a horse farm or near an airport and are somehow shocked (more likely feigning shock) to learn that horses and airplanes do horse and airplane things there.
Or buy a house that backs onto a mainline railway that sees 10+ freight trains a day, then write to the city to complain about the noise.
Exactly! If the house near to the rail line, airport, pig farm, or landfill is cheaper, it might be that way for a reason.
I read about the railway situation in my local paper the other week. They were trying to get them to institute a no-horns rule in the area, which is not likely to succeed.
A passenger railway in a nearby city has the no-horns rule, but that case is different because the line was dead for more than a decade before it was revived, the train has a strict speed limit while in the city, the only at-grade crossings (2 or 3) are well-protected with gates, lights, bells, and pedestrian mazes, and it travels through a dense residential area.
Yep, and it's even worse if enough people complain and your tax dollars are used to build a sound barrier.
You can spread a thin layer, maybe one centimeter thick almost fresh from the horse. Though I prefer them dried for maybe up to a few days, because less mess. Worked excellently so far.
That seems strange to me. Here the horse dung is valued, and the renters/owners of allotment gardens pay for having it delivered to them on flatbed trailers as excellent fertilizer. I sometimes grab an old empty can of paint (because it has a lid) and shovel some into it, to be dispersed onto the plant containers and flower boxes on my balconies.
> A better model would really be a low-waste lifestyle and compostable packaging/materials.
Your suggestion only affects how much trash is generated, not the need to process the trash that's generated.
Unless your idealistic "low-waste lifestyle" is able to generate zero waste, the suggestion is pointless.
How much trash is generated does substantially impact how we manage that trash. This would reduce the frequency of trash pickup, transport, and storage. If it's reduced sufficiently, then the idea about building and maintaining tube infrastructure would not make sense.
Some people reduce it to this [1]. Probably not achievable for most, but a 75% reduction would be significant [2].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/22/zero-was...
[2] https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/trash-americans-p...
> How much trash is generated does substantially impact how we manage that trash.
Volume has an impact on the throughout of the system,not the need to move trash from the producers to the consumers.
This thread is about a proposal for a new system to transport trash. Reducing the amount of trash produced per capita does not eliminate the need to transport trash.
"Reducing the amount of trash produced per capita does not eliminate the need to transport trash."
But a significant reduction would make the proposed system meaningless from a cost benefit perspective. I already see this system as having no real benefit. Trash is $250/year and sewer is $1250/year, so this new sewer-like proposal will likely be more expensive than it is now.
This is just the systems thinking approach. Who cares about transporting trash if you still have all the other problems, like dumping it in landfills. It's better to think about the entire system and make changes that benefit us on multiple levels. If you aren't willing to talk about the entire problem space, then that tells me something about the quality of the proposal...
Water soluble waste.
Depends. Those water soluble packing peanuts are way better than plastic. But probably not great to be adding those corn-based chemicals to the water in high concentrations. Not to mention this might not be useful to water constrained areas, especially with the UN saying water scarcity is expected to dramatically increase in the next decade or two.
I don't see that working for packaging. Half of the food is filled with or submerged in water, and for the rest, as well as non-food items, the packaging would start decomposing in the ambient air because of the water vapor.
You should revisit this comment after you have children.
We need this. I really like this idea and I think my city would benefit a lot as we still have trash being collected not from underground bins but from bags laid out on the street. One thing that I don't like: the incentized tax scheme Bergen uses. Environmentalist politicians tried that here (Netherlands) as well in some towns. However what happens is that poor residents will use trashbins in parks or will just leave it on the street. It might work in Bergen, which is the heart of Norway's oil industry and one of the richest places in Europe. But elsewhere it's unlikely to work.
In the former soviet block, moist of the built blocks had garbage chutes, but today almost all off them are out of service and welded shut. They would smell terribly all year long, rats would climb up the shaft to your apartment. And the poor guy who had to empty the collection room at the bottom never knew when somebody would throw something disgusting down at his head. So yeah, I don't know if putting garbage in tubes, pneumatic or nor is a good idea.
The future of garbage collection is unblocking pneumatic tubes.
The Roosevelt Island system.[1]
[1] https://untappedcities.com/2020/04/09/inside-roosevelt-islan...
Notably,
> The Roosevelt Island trash system was created before the advent of recycling, so there is currently no way to have multiple streams of waste to handle recyclables ... residential buildings deliver their recyclables to a central location outside the AVAC facility to place in specific dumpsters.
Bags leak. Liquids coat everything. Residue rots.
There is one good solution to garbage: carefully haul it away in tightly closed containers. Not "blow it around in high-pressure pipes"
All issues that have been solved in existing implementations of this that have been going around for decades.
Not mentioned in the article. They simply talk of fans blowing the 'bags' around at 60MPH. Not what happens when a plug occurs, or a bag breaks.
Maybe this is more revealing of how my mind works than an actual flaw, but this seems like it would be great for getting rid of evidence.
In many places, your garbage becomes "public" the moment you relinquish custody of it. These tubes will be metered, and the mechanism to do that will enable the police to grab your canisters as they arrive at network hubs.
Only after Samsung has scanned it to decide what advertising to pump into your smart TV.
You jest, but I fear we're not far from chemical analyzers being put into the sewage system, so that advertisers can detect a sudden appearance of e.g. pregnancy hormones in someone's toilet output, and helpfully spam them with baby stuff ads.
I remember reading about work to build something like that in public toilets to detect potential infections spreading around a city, but I'll be voting against such projects up and until the adtech industry is burned down to the ground.
These (probably) have cameras on them - https://centers.ibs.re.kr/html/living_en/housing/trash-avc.h...
Rubbish surveillance is a thing. Some tip trucks have internal cameras.
Remove the toilet bowl and put it down there?
I dunno, on the flip side it could be a good way to collect evidence if the garbage coming out your tube could be tagged somehow
Every large project needs people like you. Thanks for the laugh.
Quartz is 100 bucks a year...
In the 70s waste chutes were installed in large buildings. By now a lot of those got removed / blocked off because they turned out to be a maintenance hassle.
Trash is not uniform and large parts would clog the system. How is this any different?
I've been using a weekly food delivery service this year, and lugging heavy gel packs to the trash was getting pretty tedious. They recently switched to a different brand of gel that claims to be "100% drain safe", so I can ship the mass away without going outside.
Are there other forms of waste that could benefit from liquid disposal? For example, I once received a package with water-soluble packing peanuts.
It makes more sense for dense cities but I think we really need a way to not have to ship this trash everywhere. I don't know if it is feasible but some kind of small scale incinerator seems ideal. You convert your trash into power and we don't waste a lot of energy moving it all over the place. This could also be a source of energy that works when solar isn't available.
The thing is, cogeneration (incinerators producing power) is a bit of a red herring; usually our waste doesn't have the calorific value to actually produce usable power, so it's mixed with fuel, which is not exactly ideal. Also, unsegregated garbage, when burnt, will produce stuff like dioxins and furans which you don't want in the atmosphere.
It's necessary for some types of waste (medical, for example), but it's not a power generation method.
> Also, unsegregated garbage, when burnt, will produce stuff like dioxins and furans which you don't want in the atmosphere.
Modern garbage power plants have enormous exhaust filtration systems that take care of pretty much any toxic contaminant, no matter its form.
Assuming that the filtration systems are working perfectly, and are in order all the time. That’s not trivial...
In Germany the operators are bound by law to monitor their systems and fines are steep.
Germany might be the only place where this tech is working as advertised.
This stuff needs to work on a planetary level to make a difference. “Just solve corruption and this will work” is a kind of complex way around it...
That doesn't feel right. Looking at the typical household production, I see (after separating out metals) mostly plastics, wood, paper, and various oils. This should all burn nicely and have high caloric value.
Agreed on the toxic combustion products, though.
Not enough to make up the difference. Definitely not as much as coal or fossil fuel for example. Sure, they’ll burn, but not hot enough. Most domestic waste has a calorific value of not more than 16 MJ/Kg, and you need at least 15 MJ/Kg for ignition. Meaning, you need to add some other fuel to make it burn. Coal for comparison gives off 15-30 MJ/Kg, so it’s right on the edge there. Industrial waste is a different ball game, but then industrial waste has lots more toxic stuff.
The DisneyWorld system gets a lot of press to this day.
However, having taken the backstage tour and standing by the exhaust of their system, there’s nothing quite like that smell being blown at you at 65 MPH.
Dumb question: what if the pipes leak? How much leakage would render the system unusable?
I think there is vast potential for moving all kinds of activities underground. Upfront cost is huge, but once it's done as long as it's maintained it's there for good.
Package and food delivery is going to have to be moved underground. People are going to hate the sight and sound of drones all day and night. Hopefully delivery drones will at least have a curfew so they're not buzzing around 24hr/day.
It's there until the next big earthquake, anyway. Which would probably be more or less okay with garbage, but terrifying for the combination of gas & electric
Tunnels can actually be one of the safest places during an earthquake, so long as its well built and doesn’t pass through a fault line.
Also keeping these things "maintained" often involves digging up the whole road every few years.
Not if there`s a maintenance shaft running along various tubes. In any case, solutions like this are only viable in relatively dense, urban areas. That would be a difficult prerequisite for many, even if it makes a lot of sense.
Some areas are pretty much unaffected by earthquakes, like the UK.