Bergen, Norway is a beautiful place, but there’s something more lying beneath the surface. The almost thousand-year-old city has become home to one of the most high-tech trash systems in the world. Instead of relying on gas-guzzling garbage trucks to pick up waste, residents dump their garbage in vacuum tubes that suck the trash out of the city.
A report from The Washington Post on the development claims that the system sucks garbage out of the city with the “force of a half a million household vacuum cleaners.” That’s quite a bit of force, and if the reports are anything to go by, it could indeed be an efficient way to tackle the city’s waste.
The design of the system has allowed for Bergen to rely less on waste disposal trucks, which often clogged up the narrow streets of the city. This has cut down on traffic and cut diesel emissions by up to 90%, the reports claim. That’s a huge win in our fight against climate change, though ongoing changes to the EPA here in the US could make those cuts less dramatic.
Bergen isn’t the only city making the most of these vacuum-like trash removal systems. Around 200 cities have adopted the idea, including Seoul, Stockholm, and Qatar. What makes Bergen special, though, is that the city has been expanding the system into centuries-old neighborhoods, giving everyone a chance to take advantage of the futuristic garbage disposal system.
Installing something like this isn’t cheap, and Bergen has spent more than $100 million to set up its futuristic garbage disposal system. And the city is far from finished installing these garbage-sucking tubes. It will be interesting to see how the city continues to tackle the installation of this new system, as well as how many other cities adopt similar systems.
We could certainly benefit from something like this in big cities in the US, but setting up the infrastructure would be a lot of work. Of course, these kind of systems still don’t fix the underlying problem surrounding our landfills, but that’s another problem for another day.
