Talk about having your trash magically whisked away. The city of Carmel, Ind., is building a mixed-use City Center that will incorporate an underground system to transport garbage from the complex´s homes and businesses to a central collection point.

 

The system will consist of a subterranean network of pipes and fans that create a vacuum to move trash through the pipes at 44 miles per hour. It´s much like the old pneumatic-tube systems that evidently are still used at some drive-through banks, hospitals and factories.

 

The Indianapolis Star reports that only two such trash conveyance systems exist in the United States, one at Disney World and the other on Roosevelt Island in New York City.

 

I first encountered pneumatic tube technology around 1970 when my family´s financial institution installed a drive-through window. Some days after school when my mother had some banking to do she would take my brothers and sisters and I through. It was riveting to watch her drop the envelope into the capsule, click the lid shut, and drop the capsule into the slot; to hear the whoosh; and then to see the capsule materialize in the hands of the smiling lady behind the glass. The first time my mother let me operate the device was a high point of my young life.

 

Somewhere along the line one of us kids, no one remembers who, coined a name for this technological marvel that held us in its thrall. It was a perfectly lovely handle, utterly logical and literal as only kids can be. The suck-tube, we called it.

 

Pete Fehrenbach is assistant managing editor of Waste News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.

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