Inspiration

My mind has been in the gutter…thoughts about the garbage and recycling system have been swirling around in there for a few months now, and so I thought it would be nice to clean up my mind by dumping these thoughts out. I started thinking about garbage disposal after listening to the “Order withought Design: How Markets Shape Cities” podcast (based off of a book with the same title), which is about how emergent order and central planning (usually done by a government organization) can work together or at odds to shape a city. Because the dicussions in “Order Without Design” touch on many aspects of urban design and topics outside of urbanism, I’ve selectivly chosen some notes on points related to waste management and sanitation in the next section as a jumping off point for investigation.

Notes and thoughts

  • Depopulating cities are problematic.
    • A lower density of people means a higher price to pay per individual to support shared facilities and services.
    • Garbage disposal illustrates this phenomenan.
    • It seems that there is a sort of undulating curve for cost per indivdual of public resources. Here’s a thought experiment considering the number of garbage trucks to service an area. If every new 1,000 people who move into an area need 1 more garbage truck, then when there are 1,999 people, all of these people split the cost of 1 garbage truck vs 2,000 split the cost of two (although, maybe the service might be better with less people per truck). But, let’s say the number of people keep increasing and the garbage routes become more efficient and trucks cheaper. Then, the cost goes down again.
  • Private organizations such as Disneyland are inscentivized to keep their campus clean because they can capture the profit of cleanliness (i.e. more tourists will come to Disneyland if it is cleaner)
    • Municipalities do not capture this profit, and so might be less willing to put in the money or time to keep an area clean…I think municipalities actually do capture this profit, but it’s less direct. In general, it seems like when the source of cash is not obvious, it can make groups upset or unmotivated.
  • Disneyland has pneumatic trash system called an AVAC.
    • Pneumatic (like hydraulics but with compressed air) linear actuator is used to control flow of waste. Then, waste is sucked by a vacuum to a compactor.
    • Other cities have this type of disposal system including Stockholm, Barcelona, and Roosevelt Island in New York.

  • The WHO (World Health Organization) came to Yemen to increase the water supply. An unintended effect of this effort was that because there was now more water and sewage around the city, the clay ground was saturated, destabilizing the foundations of existing buildings in the area.

  • How do city planners or officials engender good hygine habits?
    • A laissez-faire method would be to rely on more affluent pockets to adopt modern techniques of hygeine. These techniques can spread throughout the rest of society by becoming cheaper due to innovations in the practice or because the more affluent benefit from the entire community adopting good hygine practices by the “herd immunity” effect, and thus spread the practice to as many people as possible.
  • The Black Plague killed roughly 40 percent of the population
    • Interestingly, cities grew in size after Black Plague. One theory is that because of the labor shortage, people from the countryside had an inscentive for the first time to move to the city to earn a higher wage.
    • Endemic refers to a reoccurring disease in an area, wheras an epidemic is a high increase in disease in a particular region.

Goals

Urban development and design is a field, and like any field it seems rather fruitless to investigate everything all at once. Therefore, I wanted to narrow my scope to a smaller topic: disposal and sanitation. Of course, even just within the area of “sanitation an disposal in urban design” there is too much to unpack, probably even in a lifetime but at least it was a starting point to focus on. I was planning on traveling for a few weeks, and thought it would be nice to have a few investigative questions, so I wasn’t completely aimless.

  • Is sanitation driven by culture or government.
  • How do different countries or cities garbage management systems work. What about recycling?

Bin there, dump that

  • Copenhagen
    • Deposit & return system. Pay a deposit when you purchase drinks and such in cans/bottles and you can get this deposit back by returning them emptied. This is not unique to Denmark.
    • On the Copenhagen waste management page: “the backbone of the waste managment system in Copenhagen is source separation”
    • Aims to recycle 70% of municipal waste by 2024
    • Big chains like 7-11 (which interestingly, seems to be much more popular here than I’ve seen in the states) give out wooden utensils and paper products. One problem I noticed at København H tran station was that even with these compostable materials, there was a lack of compost bins in the immediate area, and I saw a large stack of compostable cultery in the trash.
    • Cleanliness rating: 9/10
  • Barcelona
    • Combination of pneumatic collection and manual bag collection
    • Felt similar to New York City in terms of cleanliness.
    • Very small garbage truck size, which was typical of many of the cities in Europe.
    • Ajuntament (city council) of Barcelona describes trash as the “remains of products no longer wanted” which sounds like something you’d read in a novel about ghosts.
    • Cleanliness rating: 5/10
  • Singapore
    • Unique trash management system. Burns trash and then filters smoke. The combustion process is also used to drive turbines ot produce electric energy. There is a landfill island called Semakau, that is made from deposits of ash. This island can sustain wildlife.
    • Cleanliness rating: 9/10
  • Colorado
    • Seems like a typical US trash collection system. In the place where I live, we have a trash bin, recycling bin, and compost bin. You can pay to increase the size of your trashbin.
    • Western disposal, which is a private company picks up the cans. However, there are also public landfills. It seems like the private and public sectors work together to handle both waste collection and processing.
    • Cleanliness rating: 7/10
  • Amsterdam
    • Sidewalk bins that feed into underground trash containers
    • RFID chip readers in some neighborhoods to eliminate unwanted dumping
    • Waste management is covered by municipal service tax. This paper says that private and public waste collection was evenly split as of 2012. What I don’t understand about this is the fact that even though there is a tax for waste, people may still be opting for private trash disposal?
    • Cleanliness rating: 7/10

Garbage entropy theory

There seems to be three main steps in waste management: collection, sorting, and processing. These processes work together to move garbage from a high entropy state to a low entropy state. Let’s consider the life of a plastic bottle. It starts out as a low entropy state, as a bottle. Then, it is bought, used, and thrown away, and in this period, is in a high entropy state, as a piece of trash. Then, it is collected and sorted, and goes again to a low entropy state, as a piece of plastic. Chemists and physicists are probably cringing at the employment of the word “entropy” here. But I’ll blame it on a good story. When Shannon invented information theory, he didn’t know what to call it, and asked Von Neumann for advice. Neumann wrote: “You should call it entropy for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.” But that’s enough dallying, let’s dive into the three steps of waste management.

Collection

  • Household collection - should this be delegated to the private or public sector?
  • Public space collection (parks, roads, etc). How should bins be spaced apart? I think it would be an interesting monitoring project to create a “heatmap” of how much people used certain garbage bins. It could be an indicator to city planners which trash bins get filled up quickly vs ones that might be rarely used.
  • The ultimate goal of collection is to get waste as efficiently to the facility as possible. It depends on where you live on how many levels of indirection there are to this process.

Sorting

  • One trend from reading about and observing the waste management process seems to be that both municipalities and private organizations push the public to sort waste as much as possible before it gets to the facility. This lowers the time and effort that it takes a processing plant to sort waste and cut losses.
  • There are now a number of robots to automate the recycling sorting process. Scalability and durability are the name of the game in recycling robotics (unlike precision and reliability in the world of say, medical robotics – it’s interesting how vastly priorities differ based on the task). The recycling robotics industry has grown immensely in the past decade and I’d assume automation of the recycling process will continue to grow.
  • Daisy, Apple’s dissasembly robot, is helping streamline the process of E-waste recycling. E-waste in general poses a big problem in recycling because of the wide variety of materials and components that make up electronics.
  • I’ve always heard the phrase, “if in doubt, throw it out” but am a bit skeptical of this now. Maybe it’s better to recycle unknown materials since they’ll be sorted by a robot anyways.
  • Reduce, reuse, recyle. The order of these is intentional.

    Processing

  • Landfills
    • Landfills are the most common method of waste disposal. In the US, there are different classes of landfills, which correspond to the type of trash they contain. Class 3 landfills are what come to mind usually when people mention landfills.
    • Daily operation of a class 3 landfill involves dumping waste into a cell, compacting it, and covering it with a layer of soil. This process is repeated until the cell is full. Amazingly, 1,200 lbs of garbage can be compacted into one cubic yard of space. To compare, a cubic yard of soil weighs about 2,000 lbs.
    • There are two water collection systems – one for rainwater (that trash has not contaminated), and other for leaking trash. Additionally, methane (a byproduct of the decomposition of trash) is collected.
    • Check out these beautiful transformations of landfills
  • Incineration
    • Incineration is basically the process of burning trash. Because the cost is a lot higher both to process trash and set up these facilities than landfills and due to the pollutants produced, these facilities are less common than landfills.
    • Incineration techniques are advancing, and air filtration as well as leveraging the heat produced by the combustion process to generate electricity are two ways that incineration is becoming more efficient and less polluting.
    • Materials are burned at 1,800-2,200 degrees Fahrenheit. The gases released are cooled with water and then generate steam to drive generators.
    • Incinerators are sometimes preferred over landfills for disposal of biomedical waste since the high temperatures destroy pathogens.
  • Recycling
    • Involved process
    • Lots of sorting
    • Some materials take a lot more energy to reycle than others. In fact, there are instances of recycling being more harmful to the environment than just throwing away the material. However, as technology continues to improve the recycling process, hopefully it can become a better option for almost all materials.
  • Composting
    • Didn’t look into this

Sources & Readings

  • https://greennetwork.asia/news/semakau-island-the-green-landfill-in-singapore/#:~:text=Semakau%20Island%20is%20the%20only,Agency%20of%20Singapore%20(NEA).
  • https://www.core77.com/posts/102208/Amsterdams-Smart-System-of-Underground-Garbage-Bins
  • https://www.just-auto.com/marketdata/five-largest-waste-processing-plant-construction-projects-q2-2022/