Songdo, South Korea is no ordinary city. Billions were pumped into reclaiming land from the sea and designing an urban landscape where everything you’d need is within walking distance. It’s become a beacon for green technology, where vehicles have become redundant. And that includes for waste collection.
In Songdo, the one thing you’ll never see is a garbage truck. That’s not to say the city produces no waste. So, what happens to it? Songdo makes use of an innovative waste-disposal system. Garbage is placed in bins across the city’s apartments, offices and restaurants and automatically sucked through pipes to an underground sorting centre. The pipes take the garbage to be burned, buried, or more often, put to reuse. According to some sources, the waste-disposal system has been credited with an astonishing 76.3% of Songdo’s waste being recycled – one of the highest rates in the world.
It’s now recognized that automated pneumatic waste collection – as it’s called – can hugely benefit cities, with its low carbon footprint and highly efficient potential for recycling. Such systems are in place or are being planned in several locations, from residential complexes being started from scratch in Malaysia to areas of urban renewal in Amsterdam and Barcelona.
The difficulty, of course, is scaling this system up to entire cities. Costs would spiral, or it would be impractical to create networks of pipes under historic areas. One solution would be to install new waste-disposal systems to coincide with other projects, such as renovations to underground infrastructure. This is intended to happen in the Norwegian city of Bergen, alongside a new subway line. In situations like this, the number of cities benefitting from automated rubbish collection can be expected to rise.