Hello!

One of my most popular posts to date talks about how pneumatic tubes are thriving in hospitals. It’s true! Those tubes you might remember from bank drive-thrus or watching Futurama are an integral part of healthcare facilities across the world.

These pneumatic systems carry things like lab specimens, prescriptions, and blood samples in canisters (and other things they’re not supposed to). Some larger hospitals, however, have additional tubes that suck trash to a central location.

They are different beasts, and are interesting in their own right. Here’s how.

Penn Medicine’s state-of-the-art Pavilion in Philadelphia, which I covered in my previous post about pneumatic tubes in hospitals, has two additional pneumatic systems: one for trash and one for linen. They each have three drop-off points in the building that push (or suck) the trash to the basement, where it’s sorted and taken away.

“We were able to make bends and turns that you would not be able to make with a traditional system [that just uses gravity],” Penn’s assistant hospital director Frank Connelly told me. Moving the trash that way consolidated garbage pickup locations, resulting in efficiencies.

The trash chutes also run much faster: a whopping 60 miles per hour! (For context, the specimen tubes run 12 to 16 miles per hour.) The trash moving that fast means that much of it — including trash bags — disintegrates while in transit.

Those speeds also cause problems when improper things are put in the tubes. “Someone put a pair of crutches into the thing and like, how did they think that was going to get through the trash?” Connelly shared.

Cardboard, Connelly explained, don’t fare well in the trash tubes, but some people think it’s fine if the cardboard is in a trash bag. Those people are wrong. “The trash bag is only for you to put it into the into the hopper. Once it's there, you might as well not have it. The bag gets blown apart very quickly.”

The linen system has its own set of challenges — they need special bags, for example, that don’t tear apart — but both systems have brought efficiencies to Penn’s Pavilion.

Hospitals aren’t the only places, however, where you can find trash tubes.

Two prominent places in the U.S. have pneumatic trash or automated vacuum collection (AVAC) systems. One is the Magic Kingdom at Florida’s Walt Disney World. Since 1971, trash bins there suck visitors’ half-eaten turkey legs and empty popcorn buckets through an expansive utilidor system for processing and disposal.

The other is New York City’s Roosevelt Island. There, pneumatic tubes roughly 24 inches in diameter have sucked out the trash of over 11,000 to 14,000 residents for 50 years. Each apartment building as a chute in its basement that periodically funnels the waste into the tube system to a central facility.

(For those keeping track, managers of Roosevelt’s system have reported that things like strollers, Christmas trees, computers, vacuum cleaners, and car bumpers have all been put inside the system, resulting in clogs that they remove with a snake, Roto-Rooter-style. Fun!)

There are many more AVAC projects found across the world. The Swedish company Envac, which provides the systems for Roosevelt Island and Penn’s Pavilion, states it has 1,300 systems in 40 countries and serves 7.4 million users daily. The Finland company, MetroTaifun, also has over 1,000 projects worldwide and even a fun little online game you can play where you’re a waste collection manager looking to sustainably optimize trash disposal.

The systems are often part of smart cities and large commercial or industrial projects, and while prepping trash for the tubes has a learning curve, it’s a cool concept. One that even shows up in sci-fi stories like the delightful novella, Automatic Noodle, by Annalee Newitz.  

Have you ever used a trash tube? What was it like? Let me know in the comments!