Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Foodtubes not pie-in-the-sky

It's pie-in-the-sky, or more appropriately, pie-in-the-ground. Imagine the entire UK connected by food-transporting pipelines, sending food sailing between London and Liverpool at 60 miles per hour.

In the UK, 8% of CO2 mixed into the atmosphere comes from the diesel trucks used to move food around. That's a lot of unnecessary pollution. Enter Foodtubes. Foodtubes calls for the creation of high-speed food pipelines throughout the UK. Each major city and centre food production would be linked and the cities would also have their own internal pipelines to
further distribute the food to neighbourhoods. The food would sail along in small capsules at upwards of 60 miles per hour. As many as 900,000 capsules could be in circulation in the nearly 2,000 miles of air pressure pipe, all of which would be controlled by smart grids that would manage the grid and prevent congestion and collisions. The capsules would be organized
into little trains of about 300 linked capsules, each spaced about a meter apart.

This might seem fanciful. But the UK transports 180 times more water than food everyday, all of it done using pipelines. Up to 200,000 food-carrying trucks could be taken off British roads. Not bad for twenty tons worth of pipes and capsules.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Crap, there goes my job. And just when I was thinking I couldn't be replaced.

Anonymous said...

THen I want to see the Top Gear UK crew run a race with the tubes to see if they can beat the food tubes either by bicycle, boat or car. Hah!