[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.