The Freshkills Park Talks lecture series continues next Tuesday with a presentation by elementary school science teacher Howard Warren.  Out of sheer interest and commitment, Howard has become one of the City’s leading experts on the history and present condition of Barren Island and Dead Horse Bay, at the southeastern corner of Brooklyn. 

The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) has released its Urban Bikeway Design guide, a very thorough and valuable desk reference for planners, engineers and bicycle advocates considering improvements to urban bicycle infrastructure.  The guide, which comes in PDF and web-based versions, draws from extensive literature search, case studies and real-life experiences, with input from a host of traffic engineers, urban planners and academics with expertise in this arena.

32.5 acres of Jersey City’s 87-acre PJP Landfill, situated on the Hackensack River, is slated to be transformed into Marion Greenway Park, a passive recreational space, over the next two years.  The former Superfund site received chemical and industrial waste as early as 1968, and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection assumed stewardship of the site in 1985, extinguishing landfill fires, installing a landfill cap and a landfill gas venting system. 

Maybe the earliest landfill-to-park precedent we’ve come across yet: archeological evidence in southwest Florida indicates that many of the “tree islands” of Everglades National Park—marsh islands supporting terrestrial vegetation—have developed from refuse piles from over 5,000 years ago. Credit for the early landfill operations is given to the now-extinct Calusa tribe, who deposited bones, shells, charcoal, and other ancient garbage in middens upon which they could settle, hunt or fish.

Scientists at the University of Liverpool are developing a new wind turbine dubbed the “Heat Waver” that uses solar photovoltaic rotors to generate energy even when the wind isn’t blowing. The team, headed by Dr. Joe King, has built a prototype and is currently determining an installation site on which to test it.

On our trips through the Staten Island Ferry Terminal in Lower Manhattan over the past two weeks, we’ve been happy to pass through the recently completed Peter Minuit Plaza.  The 1.3-acre plaza fronts the ferry terminal and serves as a nexus of transportation modes and public space at the tip of the island: ferry, subways, buses, bikeways, benches and outdoor tables and chairs are all present here. 

A two-year study at Michigan State University finds that growing native prairie grasses for biofuel harvesting is more beneficial to wildlife populations than monoculture stands of corn. The research team, headed by biologist Bruce Robertson, attempted to identify ecologically sound biofuel alternatives that are as cost-effective as corn, which is currently the primary feedstock for deriving ethanol in the US.

Finnish company ZenRobotics has developed a device which can autonomously detect and remove recyclable materials from trash, diverting waste from landfills. The currently-unnamed technology consists of a series of sensors which analyze the physical and material properties of garbage on a conveyor belt. 

The incredibly steep slope of northern Italy’s Muro di Sormano (“Wall of Sormano”, a mountain road perceived as a “wall” by many determined cyclists) was a part of the course for the Giro di Lombardia from 1960-62, and is considered to be one of the most difficult cycling tracks in the world.

Inspired by the natural process of photosynthesis, the Nocera group in the chemistry department at MIT claims to have successfully produced “artificial leaves,” small and inexpensive solar cells that can convert sunlight and water into energy.

About the shape of a poker card but thinner, the device is fashioned from silicon, electronics and catalysts, substances that accelerate chemical reactions that otherwise would not occur, or would run slowly.

The Freshkills Park development team at the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation is in the process of designing a 3.2-mile off-road bicycle and pedestrian path running north-south along the eastern edge of the future Freshkills Park site.  We are hosting an open house tomorrow, Saturday May 14th, to talk about the project and to answer questions about it. 

The Dirt recently provided a thorough review of presentations made at this year’s Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) conference.  The conference focused on “novel ecosystems”—new combinations of species that result from the influence of people—and the issues restoration ecologists must consider in the face of unrelenting urbanization. 

A report produced last summer by the US Forest Service’s Northern Research Station highlights the benefits of trees in urban environments, quantifies levels of existing tree cover in urbanized areas across the US and elucidates some of the issues and challenges involved with expanding urban forests (for the study, “urban forests” included all trees found within an urban region, such as on streets, yards, parks, etc.). 

According to the American Bird Conservancy (ABC), an estimated 100,000 to 440,000 birds die from collisions from wind turbines in the United States each year, and by 2030 that figure could easily surpass 1 million per year. Although ABC is in support of alternative energy choices such as wind power, they recommend passing regulations for the wind energy industry that take into consideration four measures of avian safety:

1.

It is time to announce the winners of our third annual Freshkills Park Haiku Contest! April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate, we asked fans of Freshkills Park to submit a haiku inspired by the park.  We split the entries into two categories, Adult and Student, and our judges selected three Adult winners and one Student winner.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the state of large-scale composting initiatives in New York City.  Though tons of food waste are funneled into citywide collection streams, there is no place in the City to process all those scraps.

GrowNYC, the nonprofit that oversees the city’s 54 Greenmarkets, recently started collecting kitchen scraps at seven locations to be turned into nutrient-rich compost. 

The Freshkills Park Talks lecture series continues as we celebrate the launch of the Oral History Projects in honor of Freshkills Park and the New York City Department of Sanitation, Monday, May 9th, at New York University.

For the past five months, a team of historians focusing on the New York City Department of Sanitation and on Freshkills Park have interviewed citizens, engineers, government officials and Sanitation workers about the labors of waste and about New York City’s most ambitious park project in 150 years.

A new study conducted by Dr. Graham Martin at Birmingham University investigates how bird sight effects collisions with human infrastructure, including wind turbines.

“When in flight, birds may turn their heads to look down, either with the binocular field or with the lateral part of an eye’s visual field,” says Martin.

Residents of Canton, Massachusetts have approved plans to install a large solar array on a landfill that was capped and has remained undeveloped since the mid-1980s.  The array will consist of 24,000 3′ x 5′ panels that are expected to generate up to 5.6 MW of power by the time the project reaches completion in 2012. 

The New York State Electronic Equipment Recycling and Reuse Act went into effect earlier this month, enabling easier recycling of old computers, cell phones and other electronics.  The act requires electronics manufacturers to accept old equipment from customers purchasing new electronics, regardless of the brand or model of the old equipment.