Smelly wheelie bins, noisy garbage trucks and scavenging rodents will never plague Maroochydore’s new city centre on the Sunshine Coast.

Rather than employing a fleet of wheelie bins and rubbish trucks, Sunshine Coast Council will suck rubbish from waste inlets in the walls of apartments and commercial buildings at speeds of up to 70 kilometres per hour through a 6.5 kilometre system of underground vacuum pipes, lurking beneath Australia’s newest, 53-hectare city.

Three colour-coded waste inlets will deal with general waste, recyclables and organics and each will be compartmentalised and sealed underground until the vacuum pump gets switched on to suck it into the central waste facility, probably twice daily. There will also be waste inlets above ground in public areas which will look a bit like daleks.

The waste will then be put into sealed compactors and once or twice a week the council will receive a message indicating if the compactor is full and the waste needs to be collected.

The council’s director of infrastructure services Andrew Ryan said the Swedish system, pioneered in 1965, was already popular in the Northern Hemisphere and would be the first one installed in Australia…

To read the full story, visit Government News here.