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)<p>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.<p>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 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.<p>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.
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.
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 Roosevelt Island system.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://untappedcities.com/2020/04/09/inside-roosevelt-islands-futuristic-pneumatic-tube-trash-system/" rel="nofollow">https://untappedcities.com/2020/04/09/inside-roosevelt-islan...</a>
Bags leak. Liquids coat everything. Residue rots.<p>There is one good solution to garbage: carefully haul it away in tightly closed containers. Not "blow it around in high-pressure pipes"
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.<p>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.<p>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 DisneyWorld system gets a lot of press to this day.<p>However, having taken the backstage tour and standing by the <i>exhaust</i> of their system, there’s nothing quite like that smell being blown at you at 65 MPH.
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.