Roosevelt Island’s Pneumatic Trash System
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- Опубликовано: 22 май 2024
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"As long as you forget Europe and most of Asia" is he most American thing I have ever heard
Am American and can comfirm.
I have Been waiting so long for this :
ruclips.net/video/mCfYi7634rU/видео.html
And mostly wrong. Trash collection sucks in pretty much all of Southern Europe, with cities like Naples drowning in garbage and I know from first hand experience that only parts of China have a somewhat modern trash collecting system, installed by mostly German companies in the early 2000s, but most of the country just dumps its trash into rivers and the ocean, which is where the notorious "trash island" in the middle of the Pacific comes from and the less developed parts of Asia, like Malaysia and the Philippines are just as bad.
PS:
What I mean with first hand experience is that in 2003, as a engineering student, I was involved and did a internship in the waste disposal system of the city of Qingdao, China. My job was to install and run a small natural gas analyzing and burning plant on a new landfill, to figure out whether the trash there would produce enough methane gas to fuel a small power plant. It was a showy prestige project for a bunch of German companies who wanted to use it as advertisement to sell their systems on the Asian market, but after I was done and left a year later, the plant was shut down and never used, because nobody among the Chinese partners or the Chinese government gave a shit about it. They had just played along for the positive press headlines.
I suppose he did not mention Africa, South America and Australia because he, well, forgot.
As much as I would love 1973-2023 to be only 40 years, it is, in fact, 50.
Quick Maths!
trump math
Here's one for the annual mistakes video!
@@JayROwen Additionally Roosevelt is accessible by aerial tramway and not a gondola. I expect this to be in the mistakes video too
@@common_c3nts Biden math
"As long as you forget Europe and most of Asia" Please can we have a wendover video on the better ways other countries deal with trash, that sounds interesting as fuck.
@@kjh23gk that's also the first (and only) video that came to my mind :)
tokyo and venice has interesting ways of dealing with trash
Here in Helsinki there are two locations that use pneumatic garbage transport but my impression is that the system is somewhat experimental.
Bergen, Norway has vacuum tubes too - except really well implemented! It also handles multiple types of recycling. It’s a fascinating system ^^
@@Deilwynna Venice's is ingenious! they just throw it into the lagoon :)
Oh, I get it. Sam was trying to make a video about the Airborne Warning And Control System (AWACS), but made a typo and instead made one about the Automated VAcuum Collection System (AVACS).
Underrated comment!
Like his bricks
He typed a single-u instead of a double-u.
@@jannikheidemann3805 So.. he wanted a win, but just got.. you? #nooffense
You're confusing Sam from Wendover with Sam from Half As Interesting
If they redo it, it kinda feels like they need to transport the trash in containers that travel the tubes, to keep large blockages and damage from occurring. If it doesn't fit in the container, then you're transporting it off the island yourself. Or have an automated system to destroy blockages and identify suction leaks.
you can also forgo the tubes and let the containers move by themselves, you might even call thise containers "trucks." Innovative, I know
@@1224chrisng What if the trucks drove automatically on ralis that can also go up and down inside of walls and on ceilings, so they are out of the way?
@@jannikheidemann3805 like ar aiport luggage conveyor belt
@@1224chrisng I believe a better analogy would be trains.
Next idea: Make a system of small underground railways, which can not only dispose trash, but also deliver things home. If these railways do not intersect with street traffic or each other (they can be stacked upon each other) then the trains inside might be able to reach a much higher velocity then normal cars on average. They also don't need a driver, if all vehicles are equipped with sensors or communication tools to inform each other about their position. This could be used to deliver takeaway food, medical drugs or pretty much anything.
I used to live on Roosevelt Island until this spring! The system is really cool, but there are still very small garbage trucks that travel the island to pick up trash in the public waste bins. During a recent walking tour of the AVAC facility it was confirmed that every year (except for a gap due to COVID), a group of maintenance workers travels from Spain to Roosevelt Island to do maintenance work. This includes snaking a camera through the tubes to identify damage, and includes a notably "tiny" man physically riding through the pipes on a skateboard of sorts.
Also, Roosevelt Island residents constantly point out that there are actually about 11k residents, not 14k. Nobody knows where the 14k number comes from but it's always quoted and always wrong.
The system was also partially shut down for a few days last year because someone put a bedframe down it. It's incredibly resilient, though, and was back up and running very quickly. Some people are just idiots. The trash chutes are nowhere near big enough to think "oh it's a good idea for me to put my old bed frame in here".
What happened to the missing 3,000 people, where did they go?
@@nataliegrn17 They got sucked into the AVAC system
... jokes aside, they have never been there. I think some news article put out that number and it's had a life of it's own ever since
Are they counting estimated homeless or migrants workers?🤔
@@donc-m4900 you'll find neither on Roosevelt isl.
I lived in NY for 5 years and let me tell you: Roosevelt Island is awesome. No cars, everything is clean and without the standard NY trash filled streets and you car ride a cool cable tram. If I ever move back there I will definetelly try to live there.... Hope they figure out the renovation of this system tho.
I prefer living in the country. No cars.... except my own, and I get to drive them quite recklessly, off jumps, etc, and make bombs and detonate them at will
It's is very expensive though. It turns out ppl hate cars and will pay premiums to not live near them.
Yet ppl still fights any pedestrianization efforts that advocate push for -_-
@@pyropulseIXXI That last part sounds a bit like some kind of mental disorder, but at least you're far away from other people!
It’s a great place to live, but it’s hard to commute from!
I've just checked it out on Google Maps and there are cars the entire length of the island. How come?
I was literally just trying to remember which place had a trash tube system. Thank you.
Trust a raccoon to want to know that information.
Bergen in Norway has one too. 😉
I live in a neighborhood outside Stockholm built in 1975 where all the housing uses this system, built by the same Swedish company and still is maintained by the same Swedish company, Envac. The neighborhood has about 60k inhabitants and is the central hub for tech industry in the country having companies as Ericsson, Microsoft and adobe.
When they built a new neighborhood next to it on an old military airfield first thing they built for the new area was this. The first building on a new field for 30k inhabitants was the garbage collection point.
So the main drawback has been how to sort the trash/resources for recycling which is very important here since we don’t have landfills, about 97% is recycled in some way or another. We even import trash from other countries. When you have a flat rate for trash instead of kg, it’s hard to get an incitement to sort. In the new area it’s done by color coding the bags, so food waste is one color while plastics is another and burnables are a third. This means you can only use the bags provided by the company. We will get this as well, but this upgrade in the collection center of course cost a lot of money.
Other than that the absolute main problem is that people just can’t handle a magic hole that swallows everything which isn’t unique for this system, it’s the same with the toilet. They press down everything. Paint buckets, big flower pots with sticks just to name a few things. And yes every now and then the robots doesn’t do the job and a guy (always a bald guy) has to crawl down into these underground pipes to fix it. They have a great bonus.
Great response @john! You sound like a great ambassador for Envac :)
@@saraarrhenius6076
Haha. I’m not affiliated with the company nor do I know anyone there or owning stocks. :) I have no idea if there are another manufactures of this kind of system. :)
Thanks for your enlighting information. My first thought was how you do recycling when everyone goes down the same pipe. The Americans probably simply don't, but the system with colour coded bags makes sense.
@scarlet_phonavis6734 we mandate privileges for them btw
Retrieving dropped keys from the bottom of the garbage chute could turn out somewhat eventfull if the trap door was activated by someone's weight.
In our system it’s activated by time, not by weight.
But good luck retrieving keys, anything you toss down there is gone forever. :)
@@macjonte since the US throws everything into a landfill and don't bother with recycling, anything that goes down those chutes is technically just relocated
@@thesteelrodent1796
Yea, that's a huge difference, ours go through the sorting based on the color of the bag. organic => vehicle gas, metals => melted and reforged, paper => new paper, plastics are a bit hard to sort different kind of polymers but they try. Glass needs to be sorted separately, melted to new glass.
The rest goes to incineration 800°C with fume cleaning, which provides electricity and district heating. The ash is washed and most are recycled as new metal, the rest (
@@macjonte I suspect the service has gotten worse over time as the economy's gone down, but when I dropped my keys in the chute back in the '80s they stopped the system (I think they could shut down just a small portion) and sent a guy over to fish them out.
Those were the days!
There are pretty nifty new systems like this in Denmark and some villages in Scandinavia that even have trash detection and sorting they check before vacuum for Computers, Christmas trees, Baby's... and similar unsuitable disposable items before vacuum it to the waste processing/burning plant. They are usually not integrated in the building directly but have stations in front of it.
Most other vacuum trash systems dont connect to the buildings, but instead use intake hatches in the street that look like regular underground containers. Using that approach would fix many of the issues on Roosevelt Island, the only drawback is that you have to put your trash in a bag and take it outside.
I think the main problem with that is the height of these buildings, so you'd need to take it in an elevator to go outside
People usually go outside at least once a day in New York, too, right? Just dump the trash on your way to your destination. 😏
@@Henrik46 This. I live in an apartment building with underground trash containers outside (in the sidewalk next to the building). Sometimes I have to go outside just to throw out the trash, but that's only because I was too lazy to take it with me the million other times I went outside.
The area where I live has a similar kind of system. As far as I know it works just fine. And the "drop stations" are located outside the actual buildings, so if you have to add extra houses, it's easy.
i hope NYC thinks of this instead of trying to demolish and rebuild skyscrapers lol
@@TheElusiveReality They wont, they'll just use big garbage trucks because freedom and guns
Some place in stockholm has it and it works really well. Different hatches for different materials and then sent off to a pickup point outside the city.
Just make them a bit bigger and New York will finally have the pneumatic transport system promised in futurama
new yorkers being treated like trash by new york does sound on-brand
Roosevelt Island resident of over 12 years here. RI is truely a tiny sliver of peace in the middle of NY although the recent arrival of Cornell Tech has greatly increased the number of people living on the island. As for the trash system, its age is slowing catching up to it. The trash chute on my floor has been closed for a couple weeks now and NY trash piles are starting to form more frequently...
Disney engineering ends up a lot of places. For instance, the train that runs under IAH in Houston was made by Disney's transportation division.
IAH = Interesting as half?
@@magnateze as interesting half?
i hate when people assume we all know what their acronyms mean. what is iah???
IAH is the code for George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, TX.
@@hotuankiet2000 Thanks. I thought watchers of this family of channels would understand that IAH was an airport code. Intercontinental is called 'Intercontinental" because "international" just doesn't cut it in a city with international bus service.
BTW Alec at the Technology Connections (the toaster guy) has a really great video about the secret Disney train in Houston. Dude took the long way home from Orlando just to document the trains at IAH.
Yoooo. I live on roosevelt Island. I didn't know about this. You're right there aren't any garbage trucks in the conventional sense. There are small trucks that move things from individual buildings to the corporate building at the parking garage. I vaguely remember seeing a garbage trucking crossing the bridge once but otherwise never seen one the island before
Got one for the year end errors list: Cars are not "banned" on the southern and northern end of the island. There's a state park at one end without roads and a small lighthouse park at the northern end, but much of the "red" area from that graphic has cars, including 2-3 large apartment buildings and all of Cornell Tech
Yeah was coming here to say that
My favorite part about this video is how he stresses that there are no cars, and then he shows quick aerial shots of the island with hundreds of cars parked in parking lots.
He doesn't stress that there's no cars, he says that the creators wanted there to be no cars and that it didn't turn out that way, even though the 2 ends still ban cars all the people live in the middle where the trash service is
@@roberttheguy4974 "even though the 2 ends still ban cars"
The aerial shot shows cars all over those too!
@@OnNom808 the only Arial shot near that part of the video seems to be focused on the cities center which is evidenced by the fact that there's buildings and roads and the bridge you can see from the satellite shot. As far as I can tell the car ban is recent so any satellite shots may have been older but cars are pretty sparse on the island and if you want to get technical about it the 2 ends are parks so there's no cars there but the ban margins as shown in the video are much larger then the park borders
I grew up on Roosevelt island, I can assure you, it did not suck. It was set apart from all the other violence and drug issues being experienced in the rest of Manhattan and the other Burroughs in the 80s and 90s
It was funny word play because the video is about tubes that suck trash, and you can understand suck as bad too so its funny
Woosh
@@Vospader0 I got it bud, I did not miss the point. I was just bragging about my home town
@@CarolineBearoline Apologies, that's fair
Did you and Tom Scott collaborate on a pneumatic theme week?
I work in waste management and we have a pneumatic trash collection system for a few blocks, it’s awful. The pipes get clogged, burst or need maintenance which is really expensive; if something does get broken it usually sucks in pavement and dirt creating holes in streets, you can’t recycle because everyone throws everything in and there is no accountability whatsoever. Oh, also the power bill for that thing is otherworldly
It's terrible, except for all the other ways of doing it.
Logistics of Landfills, coming soon on Wendover
We used to have that system. Eventually we dug it up. People kept throwing away stuff that wasn’t meant for the system. Stuff like irons. So the pipes leaked all the time and it water came in and froze. Fun times in the Swedish winter.
Just imagine how many things have the “no trash” stickers on them that end up in the landfill. Earth is screwed
I was born and raised in Queensbridge and my grandmother and aunts who were nurses worked there and retired. When my grandmother was there, it was called welfare island.
The newest part of the city in Lund, Sweden, which is currently being built (called Brunnshög if you want to google) went live with its vacuum trash pipe system earlier this year. While not completely car free, the city district has a clear direction towards minimising car traffic and enabling car free living. And like Roosevelt Island, when their system was planned, the city district is completely new so they can plan the pipe layout before any buildings are built.
The residents go out to waste sorting stations near their apartments that look like the typical receptacles for underground recycling containers (very common in Europe), but instead of a container underneath there's a pipe to a big container outside the town so garbage trucks don't have to congest the streets. This means there are separate pipes for paper packaging, plastic, organic waste, and combustible waste. Metal, paper and glass still have to be dumped in normal containers though, presumably because of weight. But those categories don't have nearly the same volume of waste being produced, so they don't have to be collected as often, and you can have fewer collection points meaning fewer (and more accessible) stops when the truck eventually has to come and collect.
As someone who grew up on RI (my father was one of the “pioneers”), it was in fact the utopia it was envisioned as (car free, rat-free, public transit, multi-class, multi-ethnic, socialist), and the trash system worked perfectly. The utopia of the island is exactly what made me the type of nerd that watches these videos and (used to) visit Disney World for its city planning.
Referring to its eventual “collapse”, the system has actually been shut down since around 2018, and the gov has refused to state why it hasn’t been repaired, giving fake timelines, ignoring inquiries, and contradictingly changing the reason. I actually thought that’s what this video was gonna be about.
Because the new Cornell university (which has 5 buildings including an apartment complex & hotel), as well as 6 apartment buildings built throughout the 2010’s, didn’t connect to the “Fast Trash” system (the name Disney coined for it) upon their construction, it’s widely believed the system will be retired.
This would be catastrophic to the island as it only has one road that cannot support trucks very well. This road is often filled with bicyclists & pedestrians.
I could go on forever, but, this video implies that the City of New York owns the island, but it was sold back to the state in the beginning of this “experiment” (~1968-73). RIOC (Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation) is a body of the New York State Government, and is run like the mafia with rampant corruption. Many of the residents feel sold out by RIOC, that they had no desire to continue the socialist utopia, and instead sold us out to special interests. Money disappears, deals are made that all the residents object to, and that no average person benefits from.
This has sadly caused the island to become another part of Manhattan, where money talks and community values become homeless. The wealthy don’t care how non-functional / inefficient things are as long as their needs are served.
I've played kickball at that field, and man, it's WAY easier to lose a ball into the river than you'd think.
"It's gone man. Let it go."
Oddly enough I spotted this island in someone else's video recently, and knowing about the system, and thought: "I wonder why Tom Scott hasn't hit this yet?"
I used to study for grad school on the island’s public library! It’s my favorite part of the city and the Chinese restaurant there is really good! Definitely worth a visit
I worked as a custodian at Disney World, and while it is true that the AVAC system is there, frankly it's kind of useless, you couldn't put any trash in garbage bags and frankly I preferred putting stuff in the compactors and dumpsters so then I wouldn't have to tear open every bag and dump it into the AVAC tube
I live in an apartment house with garbage suction. Two subway stations worth of buildings are all hooked up to the same system. It's like 50 years old and works great.
@@HalfAsInteresting. It's in Stockholm Sweden. Can't find that much information about it, but it's likely an Envac system as well. Stockholm has several of them, and are slowly building more and more of them still. If you really want to look in to it the Swedish word for it is "sopsugsanläggning", but not much info that I could find easily on Google about them, and none in English.
For me it's an automated valve installed at the bottom of the (normal internal) garbage chute that opens once each morning (you can hear it a bit), so no separate room for it. The garbage bags fills up at the bottom floor in the chute until next day when it empties. Once or twice someone has crammed a pizza box in the garbage chute, but it didn't make it past the valve at the bottom, but the bottom floor has a slightly bigger opening to the chute where they can take out too large object easily. The doors to the garbage chute other than on the bottom floor is not that big, so hard to fit anything bigger than a normal garbage bag in them.
I heard of one issue like 10 years ago where someone somehow managed to cram a child toy car (the type they ride on) in the garbage chute, that was small enough to pass through the valve but was large enough to get stuck in the tube at a bend. The housing cooperative have a quarterly newsletter for those living in it, where they reminded us that we are only allowed to throw trash in normal (small) trash bags down the chute, and we must take larger trash to a local recycling center. And that the removal process of the toy car cost them (i don't remember the sum, but not that high, like $1k?), and that this cost will lead to increased rent if continues. They had a foto of the car stuck in the pipe, and looked like they had some remote controlled thing on a rope they lowered down, with a camera and an arm to hook the stuck object to pull it up.
The idea itself is actually really smart. Some South Korean cities have integrated a similar system with better tech and some design changes to prevent overly large garbage from getting into the tubes, and it works incredibly well from what I understand.
I live in Bergen, Norway where trash has been collected in pneumatic tubes (called the Bossnett) in the city centre since 2015. It’s wonderful, less rats, less garbage trucks and a lot easier for all the people living in narrow, medieval ‘streets’ and had to carry their garbage bins onto the roads where garbage trucks could actually fit.
That is also an Envac system!
Having been there plenty of times, it currently feels pretty much just like the surrounding neighborhoods.
Interesting. Both Sam from HAI and Tom Scott have uploaded a video featuring numedic tubes. One for radioactive material and now this one for trash.
Yeah saying they're a bad idea full stop and then only using 1 40 year example as a reason why isn't a good argument. There's many smaller scale places that use it, like 2,000 home places. A 7,000 home or so area is being built from scratch in London and has a system like this in it which also integrates trash cans along the street into it and has separate recycling bins/tubes too. They must be good if they're being built now. It's just that using this island from 40 years ago might not be good enough. Doesn't matter much either way though if the buildings were more dense which they should be in that location, like a large building with 800 homes alone would generate a truck load of trash and doesn't need to be consolidated with others. Plus it's all collected in the basement so residents dont hear it anyway. It's all compacted in the basement too.
I had a system like this at an apartment in Sweden. Since it has its own trash compactor, the trash truck doesn't need to come as often, or have a trash compactor. But it was weird to trash things in a vacuum tube. Then again, the negative pressure meant the trash chute didn't smell. (Yes, Swedish apartment buildings often have trash chutes in the stairwell, IDK if that's a thing in other countries).
Thank you for the clip at 1:13 of Haymarket in Boston from the early 1960s.
Fitting that Roosevelt Island does this since Roosevelt was the 1st President who fought for conservation of the environment.
I've worked on abattoir waste disposal made by people who make municipal systems (thought it was a Finnish company but could have been these guys) very simple, clean and just driven by compressed air, dumps everything straight into the back of a truck.
It's the trapdoor vac seals obove the truck trailer that were most problematic, held on to my tools pretty tight!
Hope this system gets reimagined with current technology.
The dump on Staten Island at fresh kills was already closed before 9/11. You should do a video on the new track collection system that loads the trash into 20’ containers and barges them down to e-port under the Goethals bridge where they train it off to virgina.
I've worked at Walt Disney World multiple times between 2002 and 2022, and I've never heard anything about any pneumatic trash system. I've been almost everywhere within Walt Disney World including all the areas that say "Cast Members Only". I've explored all the "tunnels" under the Magic Kingdom. I've taken out the trash and seen where it goes. There is no pneumatic trash system at Walt Disney World. If there ever was such a system, which I doubt, it must have ended a long time ago.
The gondola/aerial tramway is certainly worth a mention, given all the movies in which it's played a role or been a plot point, but Roosevelt Island is VERY connected to the rest of the city via tramway, subway, ferries, buses, and automobiles.
Kinda curious what they do about recycling, like are there separate chutes? Or does that have to be done by trucks? Or do you just not recycle?
In the video he said the system used the existing garbage chutes... I don't think they had dedicated recycling infrastructure, in the early 70s, in buildings god knows how old :P Best to hope for is incineration. But I would not know.
In a lot of living arrangements in NYC, disposal is single-stream for users, and workers separate recyclables from garbage. Depends on the nature of apartment building, borough and neighborhood, building superintendent, etc. City trash, like on street corners and subways, is always single-stream.
Lol, in the US? I guess everything goes to a landfill... probably the only rich country still doing that...
I really like this slightly less snarky script. Love your humor!
i love stock video complilations, not distracting in any way!
I worked for the NYS Urban Development Corporation (UDC) that existed before the Empire State Development Corporation, and we built Roosevelt Island's Northtown and Southtown residential buildings. Additional buildings were planned for subsequent phases. Instead, the Cornell University science center was created.
cars are allowed on the island from end to end btw...not much parking though and it's just one one-way road (except at a few intersections with two-way traffic)
It's a really cool novel idea for trash that could enhance infrastructure, especially if they can find a way for the tube system to shoot trash into energy-creating trash incinerators that could help power the location. And, if they can figure a way to filter the CO2 and other crap from the exhaust of the incinerator, it would be a "nearly green" energy source with nearly unlimited input. I'm sure it's way more complicated than that but sounds cool.
It's funny he mentioned it during the video, I have seen the system under Magic Kingdom as part of a backstage tour.
It doesn't even need to be a engineer to imagine the problems like humans throwing things that shouldn't be trown there and the price.
The price probably isn't too bad, _until_ someone throws in something that shouldn't be in there.
The problem relating to humans throwing things is anywhere, doesn't matter which system pneumatic underground or traditional waste bins standing on the streets. It's a human problem as you state.
Your shot at Staten Island didn't go unnoticed.
I love how everytime there’s a video about something special in new york, there’s always a place in europe or asia that does it better and still, the video is about new york lol
So the island has pretty much the same trash system as the Death Star. Gotcha!
I went on school on Roosevelt Island for 6 years and never knew about these, wow.
We have this in my neighborhood in Stockholm. Built in the 80s when this suburbs was built, it was just renovated after a major stoppage that took a couple of years to fix, not due to technical issues though but due to political issues of jurisdiction. We got to experience garbage bins and garbage trucks for a couple of years and we don't want to go back to that!
I work with a pneumatic tube system and it is supper cool! It makes me wonder if their are other possible uses for them in today's society.
I thought of a simpler system, but it uses wall and hanging carts on tracks and it also delivers stuff, not just remove stuff.
A buddy of mine has an apartment in an area of Oslo and they have a pneumatic system there. I don't know much more about it though.
Disney’s AVAC system is horrible. It frequently breaks down, sometimes for months on end, leaving trash to rot away in the tubes and making the utilidor tunnels under the Magic Kingdom reek. Meanwhile cast members have to resort to more traditional trash disposal methods, which is difficult because the park wasn’t designed with the right space and resources, since the AVAC is theoretically supposed to work.
Thanks for the awesome content and great video!
1:30 "The country's leading expert in processing garbage: Disney"
God damn this is so accurate
i lived in an area of Denmark where there was such a system. Build in the late 60. It was sucked to a plant that burned the trash to make warmt for the the houses in the area.
Born raised in Queens, had been to Manhattan hundreds of times by the time I was 10 in addition to Manhattan, I as well had visited Morocco, Canada and Mexico & Florida.
In 1983 I was 10, I went to an Apt. there for a music class, It was the strangest place i had ever been to in my life.
Roosevelt Island (to me) was like another world. Split level apts, clean streets, no cars, def another world.
This sounds like more of a problem of having not enough scale, recycling infrastructure, and pipe reinforcement rather than an issue with the vacuum or basic underlying idea of trash transport tunnels
New York is building a second system like this for the Hudson yard development too. It seems even NYC does a full neighborhood redevelopment they put this system in.
For existing neighborhoods it is much too complex to install. On the other hand, for new neighborhoods or neighborhood redevelopment it is for me the ideal solution. In some new districts in France these systems are installed and work well.
A citywide pneumatic collection system can work, just it won't be under every building. Make drop off points accessable to only waste workers so odd things ( computers, furnitures, bodies) won't clog it to make the system last long..
If and when they rebuild it, the obvious solution would be to transport the trash underneath sidewalks. Any major issues would be able to be fixed by simply tearing up the sidewalk, rather than tearing up a building. Expansion would also be easier, as most of the piping would be easily accessible for construction, rather than buried underneath a building.
My college professor was Chief architect for the UDC and oversaw this project. If you visit NYC, you have to go; it feels like the Netherlands or something there’s nowhere like it in the city. Especially if you’re an affordable housing nerd as most of the island was originally designed for that purpose.
I love Roosevelt Island. Many great soccer fields
Happy 2023! I wonder if they’ll replace those pneumatic tubes this year
Giant underground pipes and large mechanical "worms" that roam through the pipes like boring machines, processing the garbage along the way. Would have to be safe for humans and animals to get scooped up in, with maybe lots of sensors to detect anything that's not cold inert trash. Probably have sensors out front too to stop the vehicle before it scoops up anything still alive that's larger than a rat.
New York already has a underground trash collection system, they call it the subway.
At one point in 2010s, a very similar maintenance system was planned in Finland, and for that, people would have had to download an application to their phones so that the reader in the door of automatic trash pipe would have responded to the phone, then the user's bank account would have been charged and it would open the pipe's door to feed the trash. However, the idea was eventually canceled when it turned out that Finns are more willing to pay for emptying their waste containers than gain access to put their trash in the automatic pipesystem.
not gonna lie, this video was already about trash, and then it started really sucking
😂
“Just to make it fresh, a prison hospital” hahaha you’re genuinely so funny man
I really hope they rebuild the pipe system with 6ft tall square vents, so that it can serve our descendants as a post-apocalyptic bunker.
sus
Never knew this island was even a thing. Pretty cool
You should do a segment on the Beach pneumatic Subway in 1870s NYC.
3:37 what is your source for that, according to the 2020 census they only had 11.7k people.
4:02 It can’t withstand a Christmas tree or a vacuum cleaner, but it can disappear a body pretty quick… Not that I’ve ever tried, just guessing
i would like a video about the engineering details. how much power does it take? how many blowers ? is it suction or pressure?
I feel like it has to be pressure, right? Like suction has a hard limit on the amount of power it can generate, I can't imagine suction being able to drag a brick through a pipe a foot in diameter. Plus compressors are much cheaper and easier to run than vacuum pumps
It not a trap door from what I remember but it is a gate valve with a hydraulic piston to swing it out of the way if trash. If you want to make videos I want to watch do it tom Scott style and go get a tour. The transfer building next to the pink bridge that connects the island to Queens.
I don't get how they sort the rubbish though. Do they have specific days when the inhabitants can only rubbish biodegradable and days when to rubbish recyclable material or do they just have multiple tube systems build in parallel?
Hi Toorero, you can check out how the system works here ruclips.net/video/OaP4sUNZdeA/видео.html We use different inlets for different fractions and the system empties one inlet at the time , directing the pipes to the correct container in the terminal .
@@saraarrhenius6076 Hi Sara!
great video, as always
I live in the UK and I've never heard of a system like this.
I live in Manhattan and never heard of a system like this lol
You should come to live in Europe or Asia to see some
London has one thought
@@tiloalo But do they work well? I am SO over the nasty trash days. It seems like trash day all the time here in Manhattan. Yuck
@Laser Space Ninja works just fine, but you probably need people to be civilised first. If they start throwing washing machines in them, they wouldn't anymore...
As a pneumatic trash collection system myself, I approve of this video.
Closest thing I've seen to this is my houses central vacuum system, it really sucks
I thought this was more normal, in my hometown of Bergen, Norway, a large part of the city center has this pneumatic system
Just imagine how awesome those pipes must be to crawl through. By awesome I mean disgusting.
My neighbourhood has that lol. Every two hours during the day you hear them whoosh from the vacuum
And thanks to the 2005 movie Dark Water, Roosevelt Island has been painted in a negative light and portrayed as a horrible place to live.
1:43 poor kid got a failed hand shake from Goofy.
Ha!
The other reason this system seems to be a bad idea, as interesting as it is, is that it makes things that are mistakenly thrown away way too difficult to retrieve! Your best hope is to get a hold of the crew right after the drop -- at least somewhere between one drop in the next -- and see if you can locate the item before it goes into the actual suction tubes. And good luck, because they probably won't let us down there anyway; we'd be lucky if one of them would look for the item and recognize it for us! Even worse if this were an immediate-suction system.
Whereas at least with a dump bin and two ladders you might be able to retrieve something for up to a week; somewhat difficulty but still a lot more easily than with this kind of system.
working in Envac I happen to know that these accidents of course happens, and many of them also get a positive end, believe it or not. As long as you know where and approximately when you threw away your "lost item" and it hasn't past too long time. We have retrieved lost keys, wedding rings, computers and all kinds of things you should or should not throw. The garbage usually is collected in a valve underneath the street and from there it is emptied. Either by schedule or triggered by sensors . Check it out here: ruclips.net/video/OaP4sUNZdeA/видео.html
with the right management, it should actually be much easier to pinpoint than digging through landfill piles!
Hey, @@saraarrhenius6076, thanks for your reply. OK, that's cool! And I'm glad there is that first step before the suction, because I've seen one system that does the suction immediately, and that would probably be even worse! So in your system's style, then what about after the vacuum machine sucked it into the bin, but before the compaction? And then what about after the compaction but before the haul-away?
Thanks, @@colorbugoriginals4457, but I was talking about before the garbage got to the landfill or even a truck, which is why I said "dump bin and 2 ladders."
I mean we have to dig up most city's to put in sewer systems
We don't need to be squeamish about doing it again
Dude, this channel is perfect
My biggest concern was more of, what happens if a person falls into one of those chutes?
The most likely thing is that they'd just fall into the building's basement trash storage area. It would be very unlikely for them to fall further than that unless they had really bad timing.
Seems like they should have tried to have a service tunnel next to the tubes.