Summary: The waste system project at City College will have various benefits that will be noticeable both on and off campus. It is designed to reduce the amount of garbage produced as well as to achieve more hygiene in high-production areas. A litter-filled campus is unhygienic and disruptive. This project will provide an innovative approach to the disposal of garbage, allowing it to be disposed of in a facility rather than in a public space. To estimate the cost and time involved in designing a pneumatic trash system at the city college, we used the Roosevelt Island vacuum suction system as an example. It would take 1-2 years to build a project like this, and it would cost around $3-5 million dollars if it were within one of the city college buildings. Our system needs pipes, centrifugal turbines, laser sensors, waste storage for the garbage, and a switch to send it to a waste facility. Upon success, plans are in place to expand across the United States.

Introduction: The trash system project for City College will lead to many solutions that are also visible off-campus. The accumulation of garbage is enormous in very busy areas such as universities and hospitals, among others. According to the official website for the state of Connecticut, the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, “The average college student produces 640 pounds of solid waste each year, including 500 disposable cups and 320 pounds of paper.” In other words, the number of dispositions that students produce is significant, and the accumulations are seriously wasted annually. The amount of 640 pounds of solid waste; 500 disposable cups; and 320lbs of paper are major issues that need to be controlled in individual use. To succeed with the purpose of our project; the budget must necessarily be economic. Thus, pipes; centrifugal turbines with powerful motors; laser sensors; garbage storage waste warehouse; and a switch circuit that directly dispatches the collective garbage to the waste space. These are the necessary instruments or materials that are essential to adapt our garbage system project. Overall, the estimated cost of assessment to adjust and modify waste collection systems will result in a total of $3-5 million dollars to be built on one of the City College buildings. The garbage system aims to reduce and implement more hygiene in spaces where garbage is highly mass-produced. Specifically, in universities where there is a high rate of people; this would help organize the waste produced by people on campus. Viewing litter content on campus is unhygienic and disruptive. This project brings an innovation that will allow all disposal rubbish to be disposed of in a facility rather than in a public area. It is important to note that the garbage system will be implemented first in the City College buildings; to help innovate the garbage system on a larger scale. For example, hospitals, universities, housing apartments, workplaces, etc. To expand the garbage system to the public, it would be more practical to start such a project on a small scale and then bring it to public use.

Innovation Process:

To estimate the cost and time of our pneumatic trash system project for the city college, my group used the example of the Roosevelt Island vacuum suction trash system. Unfortunately, there was no information about the total cost of the Roosevelt trash system however we did find that the system got a $1.7 million upgrade in 2019 by ENVAC (Young 2021). The upgrade included new energy-efficient fans and remote sensor monitoring (Young 2021). Since we don’t have the total cost of the trash system, we decided to guess how much the project cost in total when it was first built in 1975. Our final estimate of the total project cost was roughly around 10 million dollars because back then there was harder labor due to the lack of modern machinery that we have today and the economy was different 50 years ago. To include this estimate in our project, we thought about the materials we needed and how hard the labor would be to make it in the city college. The materials we need for this project are pipes, centrifugal turbines with powerful motors, laser sensors, waste storage for the garbage, and a switch to send the garbage to a waste facility. With that being said we believe the project would take 1-2 years to build and cost around $3-5 million dollars for it to be built in one of the city college buildings.

GOALS/Proposed Program:

• Safer, cleaner campuses and a better quality of life for residents

• Less physically demanding labor for caretakers

• Fewer vehicles in pedestrian areas

• More resilient waste removal, regardless of storms, snow, staffing levels or holidays

IMPACT AT PLANNED GROUNDS:

• 16,000 students no longer have to see and

smell garbage near their homes

• 12,000 hours/year of caretaker labor can

be reallocated (for other important tasks

at Polo Grounds)

• Better working conditions and job quality

for caretakers encourages job retention

• raising the standard for waste

management infrastructure in ccny

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Residents throw trash in their building’s trash chute. Once the storage at the bottom of the chute is full, the system is turned on and the discharge valve opens.

Fans or air pumps at the central facility turn on generating a powerful vacuum. Trash is carried at up to 60mph to the collection facility.

At the collection facility, trash is compacted directly into sealed containers and the exhaust air is filtered and released.

 The Department of Sanitation trucks full containers off site.

References:

College and University recycling. (2020, February). Retrieved from https://portal.ct.gov/DEEP/Reduce-Reuse-Recycle/Schools/College-and-University-Recycling

Conner, D. (2020, September 1). Garbage disposal smells bad? Try this | Conner’s appliance. Retrieved from https://www.connersappliance.com/blog/garbage-disposal-smells-bad/

Preville, F. (2020, March 9). Vacuum waste: A tech whose time has finally come. Retrieved from https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/vacuum-waste-a-tech-whose-time-has-finally-come-f265b4f662cc

Young, M. Y. (2021). Untapped NY Now Offers Audio Tours in Partnership with Gesso. Untapped New York.

Inside Roosevelt Island’s Futuristic Pneumatic Tube Trash System

ROSSIGNOL, K. (2018, October 15). Celebrating sustainable campuses nationwide. Retrieved from 

https://www.dumpsters.com/blog/campus-sustainability-month

REFLECTION:

To reflect on this project, I didn’t like the idea of having a group project at first because everyone was tired and getting overwhelmed with work so I thought to myself it’s going to be difficult for everyone to cooperate with each other. However it was somewhat fun to set up the whole project with slides and sharing ideas on what to do. In my group I was the one who wrote and researched about the Innovation process and did half of the slides. At first it felt like only Osmar and I were being on top of our work since we texted each other in the group chat to check up. Luckily in the end the other two members did their part in the presentation by presenting their own work. Next time in my group assignments I’m going to try to motivate my group members to do their work early and on time with the group because my group for this project were unprepared before presenting.