WHEN TRASH GOES DOWN THE TUBES
The Island with No Garbage
If you walk around the island of Manhattan long enough, you’ll certainly come across heaps of garbage bags piled up on street curbs. With more than two million people living on the island and another nearly two million entering each day to work and play, there’s a lot of trash to be collected. Building management, superintendents, and janitorial crews put the garbage out on the sidewalk so that sanitation workers can drive by and easily toss the refuse into the back of their trucks. This is not surprising, though. How else could Manhattan deal with garbage?
Well, it turns out that some of Manhattan has a very different solution. Roosevelt Island sits in the East River, with the island of Manhattan to its west and Long Island to its east. This 2-mile-long, 800-foot-wide strip of land is home to approximately ten thousand New Yorkers. Like its neighbor to the west, Roosevelt Island is part of the borough of Manhattan. Unlike the more famous part of the borough, though, Roosevelt Island has almost no garbage trucks. To understand why you’ll need to look to Walt Disney World.
When Walt Disney came up with his plan for a magical city in Orlando, Florida, he had a grand desire to make it something beyond what anyone had seen before. Having garbage on the roadside as Mickey and friends paraded down Main Street, U.S.A. would be the opposite of that, so the Disney team sought other solutions. What they found was a Swedish company’s innovation, called the Automated Vacuum Collection system, or AVAC for short.
AVAC is a series of interconnected, underground pneumatic tubes. At this time, trash chutes were already common throughout the United States, particularly in larger buildings, and AVAC used the same basic idea. However, instead of that trash collecting into a dumpster or trash compactor, the high-powered vacuums in the AVAC would fly the garbage off to a centralized location away from the theme park’s guests.
No trash bags on the street and no garbage trucks blocking traffic—sounds great, right? The Swedish innovators thought so, and the company wasn’t intent on letting Disney keep this technology to itself, either. They believed that it was so transformative (cities without garbage trucks!) that it would sweep the nation. Unfortunately, things didn’t play out this way, but there’s one other place that did welcome the AVAC system: Roosevelt Island.
For most of its history, the island was mainly used to house hospitals and an asylum (called “the New York City Lunatic Asylum” until 1894), and few people outside of these institutions lived on the island full-time. But an effort to increase affordable housing in the city in the 1970s changed Roosevelt Island’s character: State and federal grants funded the creation of apartment buildings there, as well as an above-water tramway connecting it to Manhattan Island.
When these new buildings were created, they were done so in a way that minimized the need for cars—which included garbage trucks, so installing the AVAC system made a lot of sense. So if you are on Roosevelt Island, you won’t see a lot of trash or trash collectors. Instead, as The New York Times so nicely put it, there’s “a 1,000-horsepower vacuum…silently sucking garbage from their buildings at 60 miles per hour.”