On Roosevelt Island, a narrow strip of land in New York City’s East River, trash day looks nothing like it does anywhere else in the United States. There are no garbage trucks on the streets, nor are there any heaps of bags placed on the curb. Residents throw their trash down chutes inside their buildings, where an invisible system whisks it away through underground tubes at speeds of 60 to 70 miles an hour to one central collection point. A 2023 review of these systems in the journal Applied Sciences calls this approach one of the clearest working alternatives to truck-based collection in crowded cities.
How the tubes actually move your trash
