万花筒 2008-12-18&12-19 吸走你的垃圾（在线收听）

Traditional rubbish collection. It’s dirty,smelly, labor-intensive, and rubbish can pile up in basements or wooden bins. This new system does away with all that and with lots of expensive bin lorries.

"Nobody sees anything happening, there's no bins, there's no trucks on street, there's no curbs like boxes, there is no kids on the bikes trying to fight with dust cars going up on the street. It's safe, it's clean,and it's healthy for everybody."

This is how it works: you sort your rubbish into special containers in your kitchen,then take the bags to one of these.They drop down into the building's basement.Twice a day,a powerful vaccum sucks them away to a collection centre down a single pipe. First,the food waste,then general rubbish,then stuff for recycling, like paper and cans.

In the past thirty years, the system's been installed around the world, from Stockholm to Barcelona, Disneyland to Dubai, but never in the UK. One problem : it's expensive. Local councils make big savings on refuge collection, but they don't pay the cost of installation. The developer here next to  Wembley Stadium,says it makes sense partly because this development is the size of a small town.

"We own the entire site, the 85 acres and all the roads.And that's the fundamental that we control the public ground. And we kinda take a benefit of that 'cause our public ground's gonna be great as a consequence of this system."

"And this is where it ends up,the central collection centre.That great big green pipe is the outlet from the underground network and laid in all the roads around here.These great big things are essentially enormous intensive  vacuum cleaner that will swirl  the rubbish around,the air,goes off to the top.The waste goes down to the bottom where it’s compacted , squashed together and then it (is) shifted to one of these containers where it can be put on to a lorry and taken away."

Environmentally,it's claimed the systems are great improvement,the challenge is to make it work economically.And with the property market in slump thanks to the credit crunch, it may be some time before other developments follow this one's lead.

Nikaime , BBC NEWS.