NEW YORK CITY – The system of pneumatic trash-sucking tubes running beneath the surface of New York City's Roosevelt Island is either a quirky relic or a glimpse of the future, depending on how you look at it.

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. It is at once a simple and elegant solution to gathering trash, and an aging and complicated beast that needs a lot of upkeep.

“I can't run the system right now, I got guys in the pipe. It would kill them,” said sanitation engineer Jerry Sorgente. “We have contractors here from Sweden. They crawl through the pipes, find holes and repair them.”

Wired.com recently toured Roosevelt Island's trash-sucking system, and followed the path of the trash from start to finish, even catching the Swedes in action along the way.

Images: 1) Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com. 2) Map of Roosevelt Island's pneumatic tubes./Fast Trash.

Trash zips through the pipes at an average of 30 mph, but it can reach speeds of 60 mph. Sending all kinds of pieces of trash – metal, wood, sharp, heavy – through a bend in the tubes can cause a lot of wear and eventually a hole. Once that happens, the system loses suction, and the Swedes are called in.

"The first time is scary," said a young Swedish pipe technician as he waited in a storage room behind a grocery store for another Swede to come back from 50 feet down the pipe. "You get used to it."

The system was built 35 years ago by a Swedish company called Envac with a planned 40-year life span, so it's not surprising that the Swedes are frequent visitors. Sorgente says there is talk of the next phase of the system including recycling.

Image: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com

Each residential tower has chutes in the hallways where people simply deposit their trash which collects on a platform in the tube at the bottom of the building (above). Five times a day, the turbines are turned on and the platforms are pulled out from under the trash so it can be sucked away through the tubes.

Today there are 16 towers housing somewhere around 12,000 residents and plans for three more on the two-mile long island that is 800 feet wide at its thickest point. The island is pleasantly free of curbside garbage cans.

"It would just be an eyesore," said sanitation department engineer T.J. Krysiewicz. "Piles of garbage, people don't like it. This is more efficient, cleaner."

Image: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com

Residents have thrown all manner of things down the chutes that clog up the system. Sorgente says he's seen Christmas trees, exercise equipment, computers, shelving and vacuum cleaners in the pipe. An electric frying pan jam turned out to be particularly troublesome.

“This is New York City. You tell people don’t, and they do," Sorgente said.

The engineers working at the facility devised a way to drill long metal rods (below) through the jams and then pull them out.



Images: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com

The vacuum system has six turbines that provide the suction to pull trash through the pipes, three for the west side of the island and three for the east. The turbines have 300-horsepower electric motors that spin at 3,600 rpms.

All six can run on one side of the island to try to clear a jam, but the engineers have found this often just packs the clogged trash tighter.

"This is original equipment," Sorgente said. "That's due to the good work the sanitation department does maintaining it."

Image: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com

Once the trash arrives at the central collection facility it enters a separator that uses centrifugal force to spin the trash until the larger objects fall out. The dust that remains is sent through a series of filters before the air is blown back out.

Workers pulled the plants in the photo above out of the trash bins residents use for items that are too big for the pipes.

Image: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com

The trash is compacted and collected into huge containers (below) that are then hauled away by trucks to join the rest of the city's trash in a landfill or incinerator somewhere.

The workers keep track of the truck containers with the round black tags at the top of the classic control panel above. The five tags in the upper right represent the five containers that were full at the moment.



Images: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com

Roosevelt Island was purchased by New York City from the Blackwell family in 1828 and became home to prisons, insane asylums, a smallpox hospital, poor houses and other municipal facilities. In 1921 it became known as Welfare Island. The various institutions were moved elsewhere in the city in the years that followed until only two hospitals remained open in the 1960's.

In 1969, New York City granted the state a 99-year lease to develop the island, and the planning began. Ideas for the island (.pdf) 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.

Image: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com

Working at the Roosevelt Island sanitation facility is a plum assignment for sanitation department workers. The place is surprisingly clean for a trash collection point. It smells of trash, yes, but it's nowhere near overwhelming, and you can forget about it after a while.

"I didn't want to come out here when they first told me I was going to Roosevelt Island. But then I saw how clean it was compared to the incinerators," said Sorgente, who has been working there for 30 years. "They'll never get me out of here now."

"I like it," Krysiewicz said. "It's totally different than anything I've done before."

Image: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com

The only other pneumatic garbage collection system in this country is at Disney World. The tubes are incorporated into a tunnel system that the theme park was built on top of. The tunnels were designed to keep the characters of Frontierland from walking through Tomorrowland to get to work, and to remove the business of the park from the experience of the park.

A quick internet search reveals that a few other North American cities have considered automated vacuum collection system, or AVAC, systems, including Toronto, Montreal and Carmel, Indiana. But most of the trash-sucking action is in Europe and Asia. Countries that have pneumatic trash systems in city centers, residential areas or business complexes include Spain, The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, England (London), China, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Qatar.

Image: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com

For more information on Roosevelt Island's pneumatic trash collection system, visit Fasttrash.org.