hammarby tubes

I am in luck when we arrive at the GlashusEtt in the Hammarby Sjöstad area of Stockholm, for a group of Italian civil environmental engineering students are being toured around the district and I can join in. The GlashusEtt is funded by the Stockholm water board, testament to the redevelopment of the once industrial area. Saying goodbye to David from Envac, who has been guiding me around Stockholm’s vacuum waste systems, I join the chatting students in a seminar room where we hear about the innovations in sustainable design that characterises this neighbourhood.

The second talk is by Klas, also from Envac. I learn more about their vacuum waste disposal system, first installed in hospitals as a way to remove medical waste and now in over 600 sites in 30 cities around the world. “We use air to do the hard work” a slide reads, “instead of a human being” Klas adds. He tells the engineering students how the vacuum system means that piles of garbage have disappeared, that the streets are quieter without nighttime trash collections from beeping trucks, that there is less physical contact with waste and how neighbourhoods are safer for children to play in.

The audience is fascinated. They have lots of questions and want to know who is responsible for the system, who owns it, how long it lasts, what is the smallest system??? I am curious about how people are trained to sort their garbage correctly. The GlashusEtt presenter tells me that they have school groups visiting from the age of 10, their waste disposal habits crafted from an early age.

Question time is over and we head out into the neighbourhood to see the vacuum waste system first hand. After weaving between bike sheds and raised garden boxes we stop at three submarine-like tubes emerging from the ground, by an apartment block. Klas points out the three different tubes – one for paper, one for organic waste and one for combustible or non-recyclable household rubbish. The organic waste tube has a lock on it so that passersby cannot use it and throw undesirables inside. The apartment residents have the key. The paper tube is also tailored, with a smaller mailbox-like slot inside. This is to encourage users to insert their papers one by one, rather than in a bag, which is easier for compression and recycling. The third tube has no constrictions, other than the size of the round hole into which people can put their garbage.

The students, used to a more chaotic trash collection system in Italy, are curious as to how the residents obey these rules. Klas tells them that they can monitor exactly what is being put where and if one tube becomes a problem, they lock it up. But mostly the residents are well trained he says. Again, I wonder how this system works in other settings, with different kinds of environmental citizens. I wonder how users practices are shaped by the system, and how they tinker with it too.

I also wonder about the kinds of social practices which get rearranged by pneumatic tube systems. One of my last sights of Stockholm, as I am heading to the train station is of a scavenger, arm deep in a trash can, looking for the treasure of a half-smoked cigarette or uneaten sandwich. Not only do pneumatic tube systems impact on garbage routes and nighttime pickups but also the gleaning which occurs not only in India but also many European cities.

Our Hammarby Sjöstad tour ends in another processing site, filled with green and blue tubes. More motors here powering the vacuum sucking the residents’ garbage into three different bins. Like the cobblestone hatch at the waterside, the entrance to this facility is unassuming, revealing little of the vacuum technological wonders inside.

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.

port side under ground

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 Sjöstad 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.

stock(holm) in the tubes

On Monday I had the pleasure of being a guest presenter at the Social Anthropology Department at Stockholm University, to talk about pneumatic tubes.

I was invited by Asta Vonderau who is doing exciting research on how "the cloud" is culturally imagined and socially negotiated and how it materialises in terms of environmental change. She does fieldwork in previously unexplored places such as the Facebook data centre.

Asta and I first met as fellow panelists of an infrastructure panel at last year's EASA conference in Tallinn. It was a great chance to talk about infrastructures again with her and to present my work on pneumatic tubes to her colleagues. There was an excellent discussion afterwards, about the materiality/immateriality of air, the status of engineers, the acoustic possibilities of considering the hospital as an instrument, the tubes as part of a body, how fiction plays out in engineers' practices, aesthetics and issues of contamination.

One researcher reminded me of Matt Novak's piece on the most Jetsonian of technologies. I reread it today and became intrigued by one of the images in the blog, of George arriving from a pneumatic tube journey:

I love how George's eyes trail behind him, a hint at some of the concerns of human pneumatic tube travel, that our bodies will change under the speed and pressure, that we will melt, coagulate, malform. Our bodies altered by technologies, as they always are.

Image from Matt Novak's blogpost.

taking the trash out

Taking the trash out seems to be increasingly becoming a pneumatic affair.

For decades residents of some Swedish suburbs have used pneumatic systems to dispose of their trash. The Swedish company Envac (previously CentralSug) have been making these tube systems since the 1950s, the first system for the disposal of medical waste being installed in Sollefteå Hospital in 1961. Later in the 1960s the company installed systems for household waste disposal in new suburbs, and now more recently in the historic city centre of Stockholm.

Further afield Envac's pneumatic tubes can be found in places such as the Garak Fish Market in Seoul, Copenhagen Cathedral in Denmark, Disneyworld and Roosevelt Island in the U.S. and since January 2015, a new eco-neighbourhood in Paris, France.

Residents of Clichy-Batignolles in the 17th put their garbage bags in green receptacles in the lobby of their buildings, which are then sped through pipes to a disposal centre 1.5 km away for treatment and recycling. The residents of the 20 billion dollar new Hudson Yards project in New York City will find a similar system in their designer neighbourhood while those working and living in one of the 112 tower buildings in the Gujarat International Finance and Tech-City in India, have since last month been using one of the world's largest underground waste disposal systems.

As eco-neighbourhoods, designer districts and techno-cities emerge across the globe, we may be seeing the disappearance of trashcans and garbage trucks, as pneumatic tubes find yet another way to spread their tentacles into daily life.

Image of Parc Clichy-Batignolles from David Fleg's photostream. Thanks to Cargofish for pointing me towards many aspects of this fascinating topic.

moving house

I am moving houses a lot at the moment, house-sitting and staying in friends' spare rooms until the new rental is available. It is always when I don't have a home that I spend the most time designing a dream house in my head. One of the important questions, besides details of the kitchen (having spent too many years in cramped quarters, too often without an oven) is of course, where would all the pneumatic tubes go?

Where to put them? In the living room, at the dining table or by the BBQ, as in the Heineken commercial above? In the children's room, like the tooth-fairy dad? Between the kitchen and bedroom for night-time snacks? Between the library and couch? The mailbox and kitchen table? Let me know if you have any good ideas!

memories of a lost library

I am office-less at the moment, and like many, my writing desks are those of libraries, cafes and dining rooms. A friend told me recently of a library in London where the litterati write: The London Library. I wondered of course, did this leathered, soft-lighted place have pneumatic tubes? I can't find any evidence yet but my search did lead me to find tubes in another library favoured by London writers such as Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf and H.G. Wells: The British Library Reading Room.

Orwell and Wells? Could these library tubes have inspired their use in science fiction classics such as 1984?

Possibly. Here are some reflections from some other writers who been inspired by the library's tubes:

"The truth is, of course, that time has invaded this perfect space. Each year adds five miles of books and magazines to the library's London shelves, while, at the other end of the scale of time, another five miles disintegrate, the volumes sometimes opening in blizzards of paper flakes, brown and brittle as autumn leaves. Mice haunt the iron bookstacks, where the detritus of centuries is arranged in an order comprehensible only to the librarians. Marcus Aurelius sits among books of etiquette and children's annuals, and laden trolleys are heaved into rumbling paternosters - a superhighway of Lamson pneumatic tubes, brawn and low pay, corrupting in the noxious Bloomsbury air. From her raised seat at the exact centre of the room, Nina Evans, the reading-room superintendent, is trying to disguise from readers the panic of two pigeons, trapped in the lantern of the dome". (James Buchan, The Independent, 24 July 1994).

"When I’m in London I spend a lot of my time in the hushed yet humming, hive-like halls of the British Library. I’ve had a Readers Pass almost 20 years now. I first began using the BL’s Reading Rooms at Bloomsbury before the Library moved to St Pancras in the late 1990s. In those days, when the BL still preserved its lingering air of Victorian decay, Readers used to request books by filling out a little chit of carbon-triplicate paper, which would then require posting through a little wooden window in the centre of the Round Reading Room. The first time I ever did this, I hesitated a moment, hoping I’d filled in my request slip correctly, but before I could reconsider a disembodied hand shot out of the little hole and snatched it from my startled grasp. The slip was then placed into a small cylindrical capsule and promptly whisked off around a pneumatic tube transport system into the unfathomable depths of the old library (the tubes used to whisper quietly like ghosts). Eventually your book would arrive at your desk, delivered by the stately progress of a rickety old trolley, with one of those carbons tucked between the leaves." (Tim Chamberlain, Eccentric Parabola, 21 July 2012)

As Chamberlain recalls, in 1997 the Reading Room in the British Museum underwent rennovation. In the process the tubes disappeared, along with the heavy dusty card catalogues. The space modernised, including electrical outlets at each desk and telephone jacks for later connection to the internet. The New York Times reported that "instead of the old pneumatic-tube system by which slips of paper ordering books were sent to attendants in the stacks, books will be ordered using an automatic system run by computer, and a light will go on at the desk of the person requesting the books when the order is ready."

The library function of this space actually moved to the British Library's then new St Pancras site. The Reading Room opened three years later, the tubes no longer creating a superhighway into the unfathomable depths below the museum, yet its many other splendors now open to the public to enjoy.

Image: Book stacks in the British Museum Reading Room, 1905. Wikipedia: "Biblioteksbyggnader, Bokmagasin bredvid läsesalen i British museum, Nordisk familjebok" by Nordisk familjebok - Nordisk familjebok (1905), vol.3, p.296. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

keeping American rolling

A railway yardmaster stays connected to the central office via pneumatic tubes, Chicago, Illinois, 1942:

There is so much to find of interest in this photo - the pinstripes and polished shoes, the cans of paint (?) and rags, the war effort posters, yesterday's newspapers and of course the bolts and metal and pipes smelling of grease, hammering and clanking away.

Gorgeous medium-format negative by Jack Delano for the Office of War Information, reposted from the Shorpy website. Further use of image on blogs to be attributed to Shorpy.

tracking objects

As I learned during my recent tour of a Dutch hospital, tracking and tracing is becoming ever more important in the circulation of objects in hospital pneumatic tube systems. Tracking systems are used in hospitals to not only keep a trace of the movement of capsules, but also link into other networks in hospitals, such as pharmaceutical information systems for example, or automated robots delivering medications. Through the use of barcodes, moving objects in the hospital can be counted, traced, and eventually, can become linked to the individuals who send and retrieve them. In hospitals everything needs to be accountable, and actions need to be traced in case things go wrong. 

How do such infrastructures work in practice though? As anthropologists have shown in their work in hospitals, work doesn't always follow flow-charts and checklists. Has someone written a social or cultural study of the hospital barcode I wonder? I am interested to learn more and to think further about how the traces of contemporary pneumatic tube transport may relate to those of the past, in postal systems for example, when a letter's journey was marked by stamps and creases.

Image from Wikipedia.