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Garbage-Eating Factories Now, Voracious Cities Later

Enormous garbage-eating factories are popping up all over; the one below combines waste disposal with power generation in Vienna.


(Waste disposal plant in Vienna provides power as well)

These waste-disposing behemoths are fine for now, but at some point we will need something that is a) bigger and b) able to go wherever the garbage is. Like a traction city from Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines:

It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea..

...The great Traction City had once spent its days hunting far bigger towns than this, ranging north as far as the edge of the Ice Wastes and south to the shores of the Mediterranean...

Soon the city was lumbering in hot pursuit, a moving mountain of metal which rose in seven tiers like layers of a wedding cake, the lower levels wreathed in engine smoke...
(Read more about Reeve's traction cities)

Via Giant machines that eat garbage.

Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 2/10/2008)

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