December 17, 2008—A massive mixed development at Wembley City will do away with the need for curbside collections thanks to Swedish technology that pipes waste away by means of a giant vacuum.
The planned Wembley City development has 4,200 homes, as well as retail and commercial property over an 85-acre site. Once complete, the whole site will be served by Envac’s system of underground vacuum pipes, which transport waste from strategically positioned bins to a single sorting station where it will be compacted and taken by truck to recycling facilities in Greenwich and west London, with non-recyclables going to out-of-town energy-from-waste incinerators.
Residents and workers will be expected to sort their own waste into three streams—dry recycling, organic waste and non-recyclables. The high-tech bins do the rest.
The system was switched on last week and already serves some 600 properties.
Envac claims that as well as doing away with the inconvenience and disruption of dump trucks, the system will save 400 tons of carbon a year, even once the energy needed to run the vacuum pipes and compact the waste is taken into account.
For more information, see the Envac Web site.
