[Zenst]

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.

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.

[koliber]

Ages ago in Poland we had those chutes as well in big apartment buildings. On top of the smell, there were also impossible-to-eradicate ants and cockroaches living in those chutes. They were eventually locked. I wonder how the pneumatic tunes deal with the pest problem.

[rrdharan]

Recycling is dead anyway.

https://www.nrpa.org/parks-recreation-magazine/2019/april/re...

[crazygringo]

Huh? Recycling appears to be alive and well in New York City at least. It's even all processed locally, next door in New Jersey.

[brianwawok]

What percentage of plastic actually gets recycled since China stopped accepted our trash?

[crazygringo]

As far as I know, all of it. NYC never sent anything to China in the first place. It's all recycled locally by Sims, as it has been long before anything China did in the past few years:

https://www.simsmunicipal.com/

They have a long-term (and exclusive, I believe) contract with the city.

[rrdharan]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/nyregion/nyc-recycling.ht...

You’re right though, NYC is less affected by the change in Chinese policy..

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

Add 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]

The article mentions 3 chutes for different materials.