Forget Trucks; Let's Shove Food Cross-Country in Tubes

In the future, we won’t truck our food across the country—we’ll shoot it through underground tubes at more than 60 miles an hour. Or at least, that’s the dream of Foodtubes, a UK-based group of academics, engineers, and project planners. It may sound like science fiction, but they say the tube-based food transport system they’ve dreamed up is actually feasible, cost effective, and environmentally friendly.

Foodtubes is touting the system as a “transport Internet.” Food would be put into capsules, then shot through a 2,000-mile pipe system to neighborhoods around the UK. The whole thing would be controlled by a “smart grid” to avoid crashes, io9 explains. The result: food trucks would be taken off the road, meaning 40 million tons less carbon entering the atmosphere. If the whole world switched to the system, the carbon savings would be a whopping 4 billion tons. (More foodtubes stories.)