[yholio]

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)

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.

[barumi]

> 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.

[koheripbal]

Even sewage, which is less complex, only makes sense in dense areas. Many homes have septic tanks.

[jjeaff]

Which is why we have sewage systems in dense areas and septic systems in rural areas.

[barumi]

> 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.

[yholio]

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.

[dmd]

> 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.

[p1mrx]

Don't the trucks typically haul propane? Natural gas is impractical to store at home because it's only liquid at cryogenic temperatures.

[yholio]

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.

[woah]

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.

[barumi]

The problem that garbage collection addresses is not lack of convenience.

What sewers do for non-solid waste, garbage collectors do for solid waste.

[timwaagh]

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.

[yholio]

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.

[fulafel]

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.

[est31]

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.

[monkeynotes]

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.

[frosted-flakes]

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.

[barumi]

You're just stating that off grid houses are off grid. What's your point exactly?

[sokoloff]

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”.

[brianwawok]

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.

[kanwisher]

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

[eru]

> 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.

[kwhitefoot]

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.

[eru]

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.

[082349872349872]

For an intermediate between bins and a full vacuum network, there's: https://www.molok.com

[hanniabu]

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.

[oh_sigh]

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?

[yholio]

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.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

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]