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You have no doubt been woken up on more than one occasion by the binmen, especially in summer months. Or else you have been held up by the rubbish trucks along a narrow street in your city. Containers stuffed to the brim and surrounded by foul-smelling and contaminating rubbish are also a common sight.

A good solution is pneumatic rubbish collection, a system that has been functioning in Switzerland for over 25 years. In Spain, the system is still novel but, if installed on a wide scale, many of the disadvantages of traditional rubbish collection could be eradicated.

How does it work?
It is very simple. Citizens dump their rubbish into bins that transport it via a network of underground tubes to a central point. Here the rubbish is collected and even treated, ready to be recycled or eliminated.

This system, distributed by Centralsug Ibï¿½rica in Spain, saves money in waste treatment, is more comfortable to use, increases the space available at street level and prevents waste from being interfered with.

Trials
The first trial run took place in Barcelona's Olympic village in 1990, covering the waste management needs of the Olympic athletes. The historic centres of Leganï¿½s and Palma de Mallorca followed Barcelona's example.

Last year Seville joined in the experiment in the popular tourist barrio of Santa Cruz (3,100 properties). The last city to have installed the system is Vitoria, which last year introduced the service for 10,000 personas and an annual collection of 2,300,000 kilos.

Disadvantages
Among the main problems of this system are the high maintenance costs, the large initial investment and the difficulty in finding an alternative waste collection system in the face
of possible breakdowns.

Static and mobile system
The fixed or static pneumatic collection system consists of street-level or inner-building containers in which residents can dump their waste at any time. This rubbish is transported on a daily basis via a system of underground pipes at a speed of 60 kilometres per hour via a strong current of air. The system is ideal for mid- to high-density urban areas.

The mobile system, meanwhile, uses lorries to connect the collection points, located in strategic areas. The waste stored in the containers is collected via suction. In this manner, the vehicles have no need to drive into residential areas, which makes this system ideal for sparsely populated areas.

Did you know...?
-The generation of solid urban waste has doubled in Spain in less than ten years, increasing from 12 million tons in 1991 to 26.5 million tons in 2000, according to Greenpeace.

- Pneumatic collection of waste is particularly efficient in large buildings such as airports and hospitals.

-There are various different containers to collect organic waste or glass, depending on the requirements. Centralsung is considering the idea of distributing coloured bags so that residents can separate their rubbish and later introduce them in a single container.