Hammarby Sjöstad's Underground Vacuum Waste Network
Since 2000, Envac's underground pneumatic network has sucked household waste from inlets across Hammarby Sjöstad to central stations, replacing collection trucks. Local property-owner associations, not the city, own and pay for it — 100–120 blockages a year from wrongly binned items cost each incident 1,500–3,000 SEK to clear, and residents have lobbied Stockholm to take it over.
📊 Impact
Envac says the network cut on-site collection vehicles by about 60% compared with truck-based collection; independently, the western sub-system's property-owner association reports 100–120 unplanned stoppages a year, mostly from mis-sorted items, at 1,500–3,000 SEK per repair.
🎓 Lesson
A pneumatic network removes trucks from the street, but someone still owns the operational risk. In Hammarby Sjöstad that's private property associations, not the city — and the leading cause of downtime is residents mis-sorting waste, not equipment failure. Since at least 2015 residents have pushed Stockholm to take the system over, without success so far.
📖 Terms in this entry: Smart grid · Fuel cell · Pay-as-you-throw (PAYT)
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Hammarby Sjöstad's Underground Vacuum Waste Network” — Stockholm, Sweden. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/stockholm-hammarby-pneumatic-waste/ (last verified 2026-07-28). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.