An underground system of pipes could be used to collect garbage from inner-city homes under plans to go before the City of Sydney council tonight.
A motion to exhibit the city’s draft waste strategy marks the first step towards the creation of a waste master plan, which would eventually involve a network of underground pipes replacing garbage trucks to move refuse to centralised waste treatment centres.
Under its 2030 plan to make Sydney more sustainable, the council plans to slash energy use and the lord mayor, Clover Moore, said the waste strategy aimed to reduce significantly the amount of waste going to landfill.
The sustainability director, Chris Derksema, said underground vacuum systems were used to service 1.3 million people in South Korea and had been installed in Barcelona to make the streets more liveable by removing rubbish bins and garbage trucks in narrow lanes.
While it was possible to retrofit the underground systems in existing buildings, it was easier to install them on new projects such as one at Wembley in England which serviced thousands of new homes, he said.
The massive urban renewal project at Green Square was suited to the new system and Mr Derksema said the city had negotiated in-principle support from the developers to design their buildings to accommodate the system if it backed the technology.
The council was conducting a feasibility study at Green Square on the cost benefits.
The city is pushing to expand light rail and is encouraging the construction of trigeneration plants to power and supply hot water to several city buildings. Mr Derksema said it made sense to consider installing waste pipes when other trenches were dug.
Cr Moore said the vacuum systems worked overseas and would eliminate the noise of garbage trucks in Sydney in the early morning and reduce waste and greenhouse gas emissions.
”They look just like a typical apartment building garbage chute [but] … the chutes are vacuum sealed and instead of emptying into open bins in the basement, the rubbish is sucked down to a central collection point,” she said. The strategy is on exhibition for eight weeks.
