Freshkills Park Blog

The latest podcast on Freakonomics radio discusses the stigma, culture and psychology of trash.  In addition to short pieces on the strange journey of the Mobro 4000 garbage barge and Taipei’s  participatory curbside pick-up, host Stephen Dubner reports on the recent boom in “Pay-As-You-Throw” (PAYT) trash plans that charge households for garbage collection depending on how much they throw out. 

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has announced its 2011 Institute Honor Awards for Regional and Urban Design, recognizing “distinguished achievements that involve the expanding role of the architect in urban design, regional and city planning, and community development.”  Honored projects are a design for expansion of Beijing’s Central Business District; a plan for reducing the carbon footprint of Chicago’s building stock; a re-stitching of neighborhood fabric in Louisville, Kentucky; a Low Impact Development design manual;  a plan for walkability in Farmington, Arkansas; and the Gowanus Canal Sponge Park, a public open space system designed to slow, absorb and filter surface water runoff in Brooklyn. 

A 48-acre landfill owned by Republic Services in DeKalb County, Georgia is soon to become a solar farm.  Following Republic’s own successes with solar-capped landfills like the Tessman Road Landfill in San Antonio, the Hickory Ridge site in Georgia will be capped with a heavy duty impermeable liner, atop which pliable solar panels (the thickness of two nickels) will sit. 

The Freshkills Park Talks lecture series continues at the Arsenal on Tuesday, January 25th, with a talk by Dana Gumb, Director of the Staten Island Bluebelt at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection.  Dana will be talking about sustainable and ecologically sound approaches urban stormwater management, through the lens of the Bluebelt, one of the most ambitious stormwater management efforts in the northeastern United States.

This year’s ONE PRIZE—an annual design and science award to promote green design in cities—is being awarded through a design competition centered around the development of New York City’s “sixth borough,” its bodies of water.  Organized by Terreform 1 and Planetary One, the competition aims to advance the City’s potential to develop the world’s largest urban clean technology corridor along its waterways and water bodies, as well its capacity to host a clean tech world expo in 2014. 

Over the past several years, a debate has played out among scientists about potential health impacts of wind turbines on the people who live near them.  Some neighbors of wind farms have claimed that low-frequency sounds produced by the rotor blades of the turbines are causing them to become physically ill—a condition being called “Wind Turbine Syndrome.” 

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/17292335 w=500&h=400]

A simple video called From Industrial Wasteland to Community Park, produced by the American Society of Landscape Architects, demonstrates how contaminated brownfield sites can be returned to productive and public use through site clearance and phytoremediation of contaminated soils. 

The Winter/Spring issue of the Freshkills Park newsletter, Fresh Perspectives, is up on the official Parks homepage for Freshkills Park.  In this issue are a walk-through of the design for the first phase of South Park, a primer on composting toilets and how they work, and a history and guide to wetlands at the Freshkills Park site.

The NYC Department of Parks & Recreation and the Fellows of the Design Trust for Public Space have prepared and released a manual called “High Performance Landscape Guidelines: 21st Century Parks for NYC.”  It’s a comprehensive design and construction manual for sustainable parks and open spaces and will henceforth guide the design, construction and maintenance of New York City parks, in alignment with Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030.

As of January 1, Italy became the first country in Europe to ban the plastic bag outright. The motion stems from a global movement to curb excessive usage by prohibiting stores from providing customers with free and unlimited  polythene  bags.  According to Italy’s Environment League, Legambiente, citizens have been using more than 300 bags a year per capita; that’s nearly one fifth of Europe’s total usage.

The bloggers behind Friends of the Pleistocene hold forth on Urban Omnibus to outline the ethos behind Geologic City, a series of field reports that are part urban exploration and part geologic survey. The project aims to investigate and reflect on New York City’s contemporary landscape and the relatively recent interaction of humans with geological strata in the context of of vast timescales.

GreenBiz runs an opinion piece by Kim Jeffery, President and CEO of Nestle Waters North America, proposing that the US move beyond traditional “bottle bills” (which he argues are limited in scope) by redirecting responsibility for organized public recycling to private industry. 

The small town of Rovigo, Italy is now home to the largest single-site solar photovoltaic plant in Europe, developed by US-based SunEdison. The 210-acre facility is capable of generating 70 Megawatts of energy—enough to power over 17,000 homes—which is tantamount to preventing over 40,000 tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere annually. 

Private UK company Advanced Plasma Power (APP) plans to excavate 16.5 million tons of solid waste from a landfill in eastern Belgium in order to harvest hydrogen-rich gas from its thermal decomposition using Gasplasma, a plasma arc gasification technology:

1) all recyclable materials are removed in a front-end fuel preparation and Materials Recycling Facility (“MRF”), separating glass, metals, hard plastics and oversized objects – all things which have a recyclable value and market

2) the pre-treated waste feedstock is gasified in a fluidised bed gasifier, producing solid chars and ash in addition to a synthesis gas (“syngas”), which at this stage still contains tars and soot

3) a plasma converter is used to crack the impurities in the syngas and ‘polish’ it whilst simultaneously vitrifying the ash and inorganic fraction from the gasifier to form Plasmarok^®

4) the resulting clean syngas is used to power gas engines generating secure, clean, local heat and power

The synthetic gas produced will be used power a 60 MW generator estimated to supply electricity to 60,000 homes.  

A beloved cultural landmark, Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport was the world’s first passenger airport and the site of airlifts during the Berlin Blockade.  After the site was closed to air traffic in 2008, the city held a design competition to solicit proposals reimagining the site as a public space incorporating the existing runways and beautiful terminal buildings. 

A new ferry equipped with emission-reducing technologies will soon make its appearance in New York Harbor, transporting visitors to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The 600-passenger New York Hornblower Hybrid will be powered by a combination of hydrogen fuel cells, solar panels, wind turbines and diesel engines that meet EPA Tier II emissions standards. 

Thanks to the huge crowd that came out to Robin Nagle’s talk in our lecture series two weeks back.  Standing in front of a fascinating slideshow featuring many of the men and women who keep New York City clean (or–more than that–keep New York City alive, as artist Mierle Ukeles famously phrased it), Robin discussed her academic approach to Sanitation, the stigma we attach to the work San Men and Women do and some hypotheses as to how those stigmas develop and why they stick. 

We’re playing catch-up recapping some of our recent events.  Last month’s talk by Dr. Steven Handel, Director of the Center for Urban Restoration Ecology (CURE) at Rutgers University, was an informative and engaging overview of Dr. Handel’s work, including a discussion of ‘ecological services’ and why urban ecology is so important. 

We meet people all the time who have stories about Fresh Kills.  Folks who live nearby, who used to live where the landfill now is, who worked on-site, who were part of the 9/11 recovery effort, who are part of the team working on landfill closure right now. 

Parking lots typically conjure up images of vast plains of asphalt half-full with vehicles baking in the sun.  But a handful of energy companies have begun to capitalize on these sun-drenched spaces without compromising their base utility.  Modular installations like EEPro’s Solar Carport and Envision Solar’s Solar Grove turn barren lots into solar farms via photovoltaic shade structures, generating energy while keeping cars cool and, in some cases, providing charging stations for electric vehicles.