People are seen walking along one of the streets in the tourist area in downtown Bergen. Photo / Getty Images
The medieval heart of the 955-year-old city of Bergen is home to one of the most high-tech waste management systems in the world.
Beneath the cobblestones lies a network of tubes that sucks trash out of the city with the force of half a million household vacuum cleaners.
Residents access the tubes by way of receptacles designated for rubbish and recycling, each programmed to automatically release their contents when full.
As a result, garbage trucks make fewer trips down Bergen’s narrow streets, easing traffic, reducing air pollution, and cutting diesel emissions up to 90%, local officials say. Residents say the streets look neater and rat sightings are down.
Plus, there is less risk of accidental rubbish fires – a serious concern in this city of colourful wooden homes that has burned down about a dozen times since its founding in 1070.
Bergen is one of roughly 200 cities around the world that have installed what are known as pneumatic waste collection systems, according to Albert Mateu, an urban planning consultant and lecturer at the University of Barcelona.
Some cities, including Stockholm, Seoul, and Doha, require or encourage developers to install trash tubes in large new construction projects.
Bergen stands out in that it has sought to retrofit its centuries-old neighbourhoods with a citywide automated rubbish collection system.
The experience offers a glimpse of the promise of this technology, but also the steep obstacles for any city that wants to follow in its footsteps.
Bergen, with a population just under 300,000, has spent 1 billion Norwegian kroner ($273 million) since it started building the system in 2007, and it still isn’t done.
In unconnected neighbourhoods, there are still plenty of old-school rubbish bins around, and garbage trucks continue to prowl. Finishing the network will take years and another 300 million kroner, officials say.
The difficulty lies not just in the cost – which will end up totalling about a year of the waste management division’s annual budget – but also in the logistical headache of digging up the city’s streets.
“It’s almost impossible,” said Terje Strom, who heads the infrastructure division of Bergen’s waste management company and has led the project from the start. Then, for emphasis, or perhaps to reassure himself, he repeated: “Almost”.
Odd Einar Haugen, a professor emeritus of Old Norse philology at the University of Bergen, has lived on a hilly street above the harbour for 50 years.
The road is wide and paved as it passes his door, but narrows to a cobblestone lane as it squeezes past a park at the end of the block. That means that for years, rubbish trucks had to back down this dead end to make pick-ups – a regular, noisy nuisance.
Plus, Haugen says, many of his neighbours didn’t bother to roll their bins out and then back inside on collection day. They would just leave them on the street as a permanent eyesore. “Visually, that was bad,” he said. “Something had to be done.”
Haugen’s neighbourhood was the first to be hooked up to Bergen’s tube system 10 years ago.
Now, the dozens of rolling bins on his street have been replaced with three grey “waste inlets” that look something like futuristic mailboxes.
“We are very, very satisfied with this,” Haugen said.
When an inlet on Haugen’s street fills, a trapdoor opens and dumps the contents into a 50cm steel tube below the street.
At a waste station 1.6km away, three industrial fans start spinning.
They suck air through the tubes at 64.4km/h, stirring up a tropical-storm-force garbage gale that subsides in a 6m container at the station.
It’s like having a central vacuum system for your house, but also for all of your neighbours.
Occasionally, a worker has to clear a jammed inlet – after someone tries to wedge in an old umbrella or a big cardboard box that won’t fit.
There’s a sanitation worker involved towards the end of the process, too.
Eventually, a crane arm in the ceiling of the waste station will hoist the container on to the back of a truck, and a driver will take it to an incinerator or recycling plant.
There are also still trucks trundling down Bergen’s streets to make bulky rubbish pick-ups, collect compost, and empty glass and metal recycling bins.
Glass can’t go in the tubes, since it would shatter into a zillion abrasive shards that would shred the steel casing. Metal would also be too corrosive.
But Envac – the Swedish company that built this system and installed the world’s first trash tubes at a Swedish hospital in 1961 – says concentrating most rubbish on the outskirts of town can cut the total distance trucks drive by 90%, saving on fuel, labour, and emissions.
Bergen officials say they’ve saved US$22m ($36.4m) on waste collection overall since they started installing the system in 2007.
That’s not enough to recoup the city’s US$100m investment yet, but Strom said it will break even “in the long term”.
Bergen’s waste system has one other advantage, officials say.
To open the waste inlets, residents have to scan a key fob – which allows the city to track how much they’re throwing away and charge a fee based on the amount of unsorted rubbish they send to the incinerator.
There is no charge to use recycling inlets for paper, cardboard and plastic, or traditional bins set up for compost, glass and metal – but if you use the garbage chute more than four times a month, it costs about US$1 per swipe.
Hauger and other Bergen residents said the fee is so low they don’t really think about it. But Bergen brought in a team of economists from the Norwegian School of Economics to scientifically study the “pay as you throw” effect on recycling rates.
Wherever the city has introduced the new waste fees, recycling has gone up by 15% compared with neighbourhoods without the fees, the economists determined.
Residents tended to report being unhappy with the fee on surveys. But the economists found that if they combined the fee announcement with a letter explaining why it’s important to recycle – and also a sticker of a smiling whale urging residents to save the planet – customer satisfaction scores went back to normal.
Bergen’s pneumatic waste system has moved so slowly because officials are timing construction to coincide with an extension of the city’s tram line and regular maintenance on buried power lines, sewers and water pipes – some of which are made of wood and date to the 19th century.
Digging up the streets is expensive and disruptive, so city officials want to do it just once.
So far, they’ve built two tube networks that connect 10,000 homes to waste collection facilities no more than 2km away – the maximum distance the tubes can effectively suck trash.
Officials plan to build a third system to cover the last and oldest swathe of the city centre, but they’ve been held up by years-long delays on the tram line extension.
This is why most pneumatic waste collection systems are built in brand-new cities, such as Neom, Saudi Arabia, or Lusail, Qatar, or in new developments in places like Stockholm and Helsinki.
Nearly all of them are in Europe, Southeast Asia, or the Middle East. The United States has just two: one runs beneath Disney World in Orlando, and the other collects rubbish from apartment dwellers on New York City’s Roosevelt Island.
“If you’re building a new neighbourhood from scratch, and you’re already going to be laying sewer pipes and building streets, the cost of adding one more tube is negligible. There, pneumatic waste collection is unbeatable,” Mateu said. “But in many other cases, it doesn’t make sense.”
That doesn’t mean existing cities can’t adopt the technology, according to Juliette Spertus, an urban designer with the New York City Housing Authority who is overseeing a trash tube installation at a public housing campus in Manhattan.
Even in cities like New York, where nearly every part is already built up, developers are constantly knocking things down and constructing new buildings, giving them a chance to create a different kind of rubbish system.
In the meantime, Strom, Bergen’s trash-tube chief, is 64 and already thinking he may have to hand the project off to a successor.
“There has to be some project for the next generation,” he mused. “We can’t finish everything.”
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