Vacuum waste system comes to Wembley
December 22, 2008 at 8:20 pm
With all the job losses and rising unemployment figures being seen across the country recently, the dustbin men of Wembley must feel fairly hard done by after the arrival of the new employee on the block, which has emerged in the shape of a new vacuum underground waste system.
The Wembley City housing project cost £2.5 billion to build, so it is not exactly a surprise that this lavish project was chosen as the location for the first such system in the UK to be installed.
The role of the new system, made by Swedish company Envac, is to collect recyclable, residual, and organic waste disposed of by the residents, and to suck it all away at speeds up to 50 mph to a central system from where it is finally carried away to be reprocessed. Julian Gaylor is the managing director of Envac, and he has recently claimed that the waste from 700 households can be collected in a matter of minutes.
This may seem slightly futuristic but Envac has actually been operating for nearly 50 years and the systems have already been installed in over 30 countries across the world. Therefore, the UK is actually playing catch up by installing a system in Wembley.
The system will benefit up to 8,000 people and, as well as speeding things up significantly, it will also make it a lot easier for people to get into the habit of recycling since it takes all of the hassle out of the process.
Hopefully this will be used as a trial scheme to monitor its success so that maybe one day we can all look forward to something similar in our own towns and cities.
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