Special Report
This sucks! OnBoard Hospitality’s roving reporter gets to grips with waste extraction in Sweden
For those who know him, Christer Kihlström is not the type of guy you immediately associate with
interesting lavatories. And you may well look
suspiciously at him were he to invite you to his house with the specific invitation to use his loo. But in the small Swedish town of Skara, 100 miles north east of Gothenburg, that is precisely what happens. Because Christer, better known to the industry as ‘The Envac Guy’, is famous in Skara, not for systems that suck waste around the place, but for the most advanced domestic sanitary facility known to man.
Christer’s fascination with gadgets is ideal for his work in Envac (previously known as Centralsug) who manufacture waste disposal systems for, well just about anyone. The company began in 1964 specialising in hospitals. The principle was to take the view that as most services to and from premises like water, sewage, electricity, gas etc are placed under ground, why not solid waste disposal as well?
The project grew in Sweden and was adapted not just to buildings but to entire communities around apartment blocks where residents placed waste into specific hatches depending on the type of waste This was sucked along pipes into containers away from the site and
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compressed where lorries would ultimately collect and remove the containers. No noisy rubbish trucks emptying plastic wheelie bins, no fly-ridden containers around playgrounds and car parks with days of waste in them, no smells and no unsightly areas. It was not long before someone saw opportunities for this waste disposal system in the airline catering market and the first such systems were installed for CARA in Canada in the late 1980s.
“Envac solves the problem of differing waste by designing the width of the pipes and the strength of suction exactly to its size and type”
The Envac system has progressed over the years and become faster, quieter and more
advanced.The principle is to drop waste into the tube, just like a normal bin. At some point the intake is sealed and a vacuum is built up in the system. When the vacuum is released, this time at the receiving end for the rubbish, everything in the pipes is immediately sucked along the pipes to the container.
Envac users have the option of multiple pipes for different kinds of waste. In large operations where containers are maintained for different
types, they are accessed via a carrousel so the correct waste goes in the correct container. The containers can be kept a great distance from clean areas, greatly reducing the risk of contamination from waste sitting around waiting to be collected.
There are other challenges. Some waste is small and heavy and some is light but very bulky. Envac solves these problems by designing the width of pipes and strength of suction appropriate to the type of stuff to be whisked away.
So how much suction is needed? Safe to say that the system sucks any amount for any
distance.The largest Envac systems can carry waste though long distances. One of their newest projects under construction in Qatar for Doha airport terminals and catering has up to 1.6km of pipes. At KLIA in Kuala Lumpur, with a floor area of 360,000 sq m, the main terminal building consists of 36 refuse chutes and more than three kilometres of refuse pipes connecting them to the collection station. The main flight catering and even the car parks are connected into the system. But smaller operations are just as appropriate for the waste systems. The Oberoi Hotel in Mauritius is an example of this.
In addition to the size and types of materials, there are other issues to consider. Addis International Catering installed the system into its newly-built kitchen in 2008 but here Envac had other problems. Addis Ababa sits at 2300
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