Garbage collection via pneumatic tubes
qz.com
qz.com
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.
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.
That's ok, as over half of all mankind lives in dense urban centers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What sewers do for non-solid waste, garbage collectors do for solid waste.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
:)
Yep, I thought the same thing when I read the title.
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.
https://www.nrpa.org/parks-recreation-magazine/2019/april/re...
https://www.simsmunicipal.com/
They have a long-term (and exclusive, I believe) contract with the city.
You’re right though, NYC is less affected by the change in Chinese policy..
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.
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.
In practice, this means that the community compost is usually situated well away from residential zones.
Also, a community compost heap need not resemble a manure pile.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
[1] https://untappedcities.com/2020/04/09/inside-roosevelt-islan...
> 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.
There is one good solution to garbage: carefully haul it away in tightly closed containers. Not "blow it around in high-pressure pipes"
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.
Rubbish surveillance is a thing. Some tip trucks have internal cameras.
Remove the toilet bowl and put it down there?
Trash is not uniform and large parts would clog the system. How is this any different?
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's necessary for some types of waste (medical, for example), but it's not a power generation method.
Modern garbage power plants have enormous exhaust filtration systems that take care of pretty much any toxic contaminant, no matter its form.
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...
Agreed on the toxic combustion products, though.
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.