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NYC's Trash-Sucking Tubes May Be Upgraded, Expanded

Posted by Soulskill on from the it's-the-mega-maid-sir dept.

derekmead writes "When urban planners were trying to turn New York's Roosevelt Island from a haven for the disabled and the mentally ill into a liveable city, they got utopian. Lying beneath their plans was an unusual technology: a series of tubes that literally suck garbage from buildings at speeds up to 60 miles per hour to a central collection point, where the trash is taken off the island by truck or barge. Theoretically, that eliminates the emissions and traffic caused by giant garbage trucks, and makes trash sorting easier. Now, more than thirty years after the 'AVAC,' or Automated Vacuum Collection System, was installed, Envac, the Swedish company that built it, is exploring how to upgrade it and even extend the system to other parts of the city. Under a new feasibility study conducted by City University and funded by two city agencies, the easiest option would be to stretch the current system south, to cover the new technology campuses being built on Roosevelt Island by Cornell University and the Technion. "

2 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Some things don't smell right-- by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Theoretically, that eliminates the emissions and traffic caused by giant garbage trucks, and makes trash sorting easier.

    How does the so-called "carbon footprint" of this 24x7x365 sucker compare with once or twice a week garbage trucks?

    And how is "sorting easier" when it's flying into a "central collection point" (read: steadily growing pile) at 60 mph?

    1. Re:Some things don't smell right-- by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      > I would imagine that large buildings in NYC would require daily pickup

      Obviously it's a bit of a special case, but I think the World Trade Center's garbage transfer facility actually kept some engineers busy for a few months planning it back in the late 60s or early 70s. Without getting into the obvious implications of Force = mass x acceleration, where acceleration = 9.8 meters/second per second and the potential energy from a thousand-foot drop, a single tower of the old WTC generated trash during the day faster than trucks could physically back into the loading dock, fill up, and haul it away. Apparently, they were mostly able to keep up until around 10:30am, then the first wave of trash hit from the morning coffee breaks, lunch pushed them into the realm of "hopeless", and they didn't finally catch up and get the system "emptied" again until sometime around 4am (the trash continued well past midnight, because the cleaning crews themselves generated wave after wave of trash).

      From what I read, an entire category of trash management came into existence with the World Trade Center, from compaction all the way to heavy-duty trucks capable of dealing with a huge load of densely-packed trash. I believe that some new skyscrapers in China actually have on-site incinerators.