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Garbage collection via pneumatic tubes
- giantg2 6y agoA 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.
- Fjolsvith 6y agoWater soluble waste.
- giantg2 6y agoDepends. 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.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoI 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.
- Animats 6y agocommunity 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.
- goodcanadian 6y agoReally? Around here people charge money for horse manure. Also, a community compost heap need not resemble a manure pile.
- sokoloff 6y agoComposted 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.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoOr 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.
- sokoloff 6y agoExactly! If the house near to the rail line, airport, pig farm, or landfill is cheaper, it might be that way for a reason.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoI 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.
- barumi 6y ago> 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.
- giantg2 6y agoHow 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-waste-millennial-bloggers-trash-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/22/zero-was... [2] https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/trash-americans-produce-in-a-year-15116216 https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/trash-americans-p...
- barumi 6y ago> 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.
- giantg2 6y ago"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...
- koheripbal 6y agoYou should revisit this comment after you have children.
- oli_b 6y agoMaybe 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.
- darepublic 6y agoI 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
- aaron695 6y agoThese (probably) have cameras on them - https://centers.ibs.re.kr/html/living_en/housing/trash-avc.html 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?
- klyrs 6y agoIn 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.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoOnly after Samsung has scanned it to decide what advertising to pump into your smart TV.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoYou 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.
- 6y ago
- growlist 6y agoI 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.
- klyrs 6y agoIt'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
- c22 6y agoAlso keeping these things "maintained" often involves digging up the whole road every few years.
- ant6n 6y agoNot 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.
- surfpel 6y agoTunnels 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.
- growlist 6y agoSome areas are pretty much unaffected by earthquakes, like the UK.
- bonestamp2 6y agoPackage 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.
- snarf21 6y agoIt 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.
- shash 6y agoThe 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.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoThat 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.
- shash 6y agoNot 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. Source: http://www.igniss.com/calorific-value-waste http://www.igniss.com/calorific-value-waste
- mschuster91 6y ago> 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.
- phnofive 6y agoQuartz is 100 bucks a year... https://outline.com/v9fWFk https://outline.com/v9fWFk
- rucikir 6y agoI don't understand how pneumatic tubes may be used to reclaim memory.
- ckw 6y agoWhen the memory needs to be disposed of you drop it in the tube.
- CGamesPlay 6y agoGarbage collection is not a big truck. It's a series of tubes!
- geocar 6y agoBaker can lay the groundwork for you: https://web.archive.org/web/20171207154321/http://www.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/ThermoGC.html 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. :)
- alsobrsp 6y ago> I don't understand how pneumatic tubes may be used to reclaim memory. Yep, I thought the same thing when I read the title.
- fizixer 6y ago'pneumatic tubes' here refers to an algorithm developed by BigTech(TM), with the paper on PTA (pneumatic tubes algorithm) coming out any minute now.
- yholio 6y agoI 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.
- fulafel 6y agoOTOH 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.
- est31 6y agoIn 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.
- Animats 6y agoThe Roosevelt Island system.[1] [1] https://untappedcities.com/2020/04/09/inside-roosevelt-islands-futuristic-pneumatic-tube-trash-system/ https://untappedcities.com/2020/04/09/inside-roosevelt-islan...
- fennecfoxen 6y agoNotably, > 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.
- qz2 6y agoThe future of garbage collection is unblocking pneumatic tubes.
- timwaagh 6y agoWe 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.
- Zenst 6y agoI 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.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y agoAdd 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.
- brianwawok 6y agoThe article mentions 3 chutes for different materials.
- rrdharan 6y agoRecycling is dead anyway. https://www.nrpa.org/parks-recreation-magazine/2019/april/recycling-is-dead-now-what/ https://www.nrpa.org/parks-recreation-magazine/2019/april/re...
- crazygringo 6y agoHuh? Recycling appears to be alive and well in New York City at least. It's even all processed locally, next door in New Jersey.
- 6y ago
- alufers 6y agoIn 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.
- jasonhansel 6y agoDumb question: what if the pipes leak? How much leakage would render the system unusable?
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoBags 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"
- Closi 6y agoAll issues that have been solved in existing implementations of this that have been going around for decades.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoNot 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.
- joezydeco 6y agoThe 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.
- pantalaimon 6y agoIn 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?
- p1mrx 6y agoI'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.