During the renovation of Piazza Santa Maria Novella this year new underground garbage and recycling containers were installed underneath the street level. From the piazza all you see are what look like regular garbage cans, but they feed into a subterranean dumpster/compacter that can hold up to 40 times what a regular dumpster can. The system costs 250,000 euro per installation and the Quadrifoglio plans to have three or four more in the center eventually.
Anyway - we were wondering just how these things worked - and the other day coming back from the train station we got a glimpse:
The whole "street" comes up on hydraulic lifts, and the special compacting dumpster is carted out and an empty one put in, and then the whole platform lowers again. Pretty cool - there was actually a decent size crowd watching the whole thing.