[Collection containers sit in the Roosevelt Island pneumatic system; photograph by Jonathan Snyder for Wired.com]
Wired‘s Gadget Lab tours the Roosevelt Island pneumatic trash collection system:
In 1969, New York City granted the state a 99-year lease to develop the island, and the planning began. Ideas for the island included housing for United Nations workers, housing for doctors and nurses, one big park, a nuclear power plant, the New York Aquarium, an Egyptian museum, theaters, promenades, a new home for the bodies in Brooklyn and Queens cemeteries, casinos and a canal that would cut the island in half.
Eventually, planners settled on a utopian, car-free residential community for 20,000 New Yorkers. The narrow streets wouldn’t be fit for traffic, or for garbage collection, so a pneumatic trash system became part of the plans. In 1973, the island was dubbed Roosevelt, and construction of the system and the first residential towers was finished in 1975…
…A network of 20-inch tubes takes garbage from the island’s 16 residential towers, collecting from every floor, to a central collection point where it is compacted and trucked off the island.
Watch the entire slideshow at Wired.
More: Fast Trash was a recent exhibition about the same system, which argued “that service infrastructure plays a crucial role in cities and is even capable of inspiring the collective imagination”; watch a short film, “Nature Abhors a Vacuum”, at the Fast Trash website.
