Roosevelt Island sucks its trash through tubes so trucks never come

Roosevelt Island, a two-mile strip in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, is home to several dozen apartment buildings and roughly 14,000 residents who take out the trash like any other New Yorkers — down a chute in the garbage room on their floor. But no maintenance worker ever bags and hauls it: the garbage is whisked away at 65 miles per hour through underground tubes to a centralized collection facility.

The Automated Vacuum Assisted Compacting (AVAC) system was installed in 1975 by the Swedish company Envac, as part of an effort to create a utopian environment by keeping garbage trucks off the island's narrow streets. At the time, the only other pneumatic garbage system in the United States was at Disney World. Chief engineer Al DiGregorio of the New York City Sanitation Department calls it 'like a giant vacuum cleaner': three centrifugal turbines create the vacuum, and silo-shaped cyclones spin the trash 'like a tornado' down into huge containers that are hauled off the island.

The system moves roughly 6 tons of trash a day, and its failure mode is charmingly physical: about once in a while someone flushes something that doesn't belong — 'car bumpers, strollers, flower pots with the flowers and like trees in them' — and the 24-inch pipes have to be snaked like a drain. 'You know, no diesel emissions, trucks coming in. It's out of sight. It's out of mind. It gets done. It works', says DiGregorio.

Wire the island for garbage like you wire it for water: chutes in every building feed one vacuum network, and collection happens underground, not at the curb.

Trash collection was redesigned as fixed infrastructure rather than a daily trucking route.

One vacuum network serving every building replaced dozens of truck visits with a single container haul.

The design removes diesel emissions and street traffic from the sanitation equation entirely.

It proved durable: the system has run for more than 40 years on the same tubes.

Put the service infrastructure under the street and the daily problem disappears: collection stops being a truck-and-noise logistics chore and becomes a maintenance job.

More than four decades after installation, the system was still running daily when NPR visited in 2017; Envac, the installer, has since deployed about 800 pneumatic systems worldwide, mostly in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.