The rain gathers around us, in an
increasingly frantic swirl, as David and I stand staring at a square patch of
cobblestones, waiting for it to move. We are at the Stockholm Quay and David, a
civil engineer and Head of Group Business Development for the Swedish vacuum
waste removal company
Envac, is giving me a tour of
one of their recent systems. There is a faint inner beeping in the remote
control device he is holding and soon the hidden trap rises majestically. Several
cyclists slow down and turn their heads.
We descend underground. The stairs reverberate
with metal clanging with each step. We are in the belly of the port, a bright
green vessel before us, with blue and green pipes in and out, Pompidou style. I
am looking at the inner workings of the
Stockholms Hamnar waste disposal system.
This is where trash is sucked
from the self-emptying litter bins scattered around the port; from the larger
bins where ferries unload the coffee cups and breakfast dishes of commuters and
tourists weaving between the islands of Stockholm’s archipelago; and from the
kitchens of the nearby Grand Hotel.
David opens a steel door and
shows me several large motors running the vacuum which suck the port’s rubbish.
There is a smell certainly, a faint unmistakable tangy stewing of waste, but it
is dampened and really not as strong as I would have expected in a tight space of
compressed garbage. David shows me the plans which sketch the underground
system, with vents for air to enter and leave the system. He points out where
the garbage is compacted and then raised to street height once a container
full, for truck collection. No-one works regularly down here he tells me, it is
a station run remotely. Indeed there are few signs of humans, besides a pair of
grease-smeared gloves and the emergency escape tunnel in case someone gets
stuck.
It’s stopped raining by the time
we step out from the underground chamber. As we stroll to the metro, David
tells me that one of the reasons Envac won this job was because their solution
meant quick removal of large amounts of garbage, without it piling up. He shows
me how the inner sensor works in the bins, which monitor their fullness. As a
glass recycling truck noisily empties its load behind us, we talk about the
future of cities and the role for vacuum waste disposal in dense urban spaces
increasingly excluding cars.
As we hurtle underground again,
this time on the metro, David tells me about the strange things that are found
in the systems they service – Christmas trees and whole bikes for example. I
ask if they are ever contacted to retrieve valuables – “Yes!” he says, people
have their wallet/keys/phone in one hand and the garbage in another and before
you know it the keys go in the trash tubes and they are left holding the
garbage. Passports have been known to go in too. I can just imagine. I know
that tingly urge to throw something off a bridge and often worry that valuables
will go down into the depths of the underground, when I recycle in my local communal
bins.
I am further intrigued when David
talks about the systems they are building in India, where the garbage that is
sucked pneumatically is then sorted not by machine but manually, by hand. We
continue to chat as we head towards the Hammarby Sj
östad district where David has a meeting and where I will visit the
GlashusEtt. More about that in the next post!
All images © Anna Harris.
My thanks to David Jost and Klas Torstensson
for the guided tours of the Envac vacuum waste disposal systems, and to Jonas Törnblom
and Malin Lennen for arranging this.
