Freshkills Park Blog

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=Ervb3qX_xi8]

GOOD‘s series The Road Map to Harmony features BigBelly‘s wireless, solar-powered trash compactors, installed on various streets in Philadelphia.  The receptacles reduce sanitation pickup requirements from 17 times per week to 5 and send sanitation management a text message when they get full and ready to be emptied. 

Randy Ludacer has unveiled the design scheme for the “Songs About Packaging” CD he will be giving away during his Saturday, September 26th performance at the Freshkills Park site.  Each package is a miniature pop-art homage to items found in his recycling bin, paying respect to the product’s original design while commenting on its disposable nature.

Plastic bags are an environmental bane: they take a really, really long time to decompose in landfills, they’re the largest pollutant in the world’s oceans, and the general the accumulation of plastics is “one of the most ubiquitous and long-lasting recent changes to the surface of our planet.”

The Hudson River Park Trust has selected a winning design for its reimagining of Pier 57, near Chelsea on Manhattan’s west side.  LOT-EK‘s design makes use of disused shipping containers in the construction of a mixed-use community facility on the 375,000 square-foot pier. 

[vimeo vimeo.com/2802531]

Before PBS Thirteen’s online series The City Concealed featured Freshkills Park, it featured another unusual Staten Island park happening, at Mt. Loretto Unique Area, a state preserve on the island’s southern tip.  Artist Doug  Schwartz has been building pyramids of thousands of rocks, spanning nearly half a mile of beach at Mt.

Among Treehugger’s 10 greenest colleges in the US is the University of New Hampshire (UNH), the first college in the country to run primarily on landfill gas.  85% of electricity and gas needs on the 5 million square foot campus are met by methane produced at a private, nearby landfill operated by Waste Management and piped to the school from a cogeneration plant. 

It takes a lot of money to clean up damaged environments, and justifying the cost of expenditure with measurable results hasn’t always been possible.  A new study published in the recent “Restoration Ecology” issue of Science quantifies the impact of ecological restoration projects on levels of biodiversity and ecosystem services in order to provide substance to cost-benefit analysis.

Mary Miss makes site-specific artwork aimed at making abstractions like site history and environmental function tangible to the public.  Her work, from the 1960s through the present, has engaged issues and practices of landscape, architecture, infrastructure and ecology.  She has participated in a number of park design projects, including proposals for New York City’s Riverside Park South and Orange County California’s Great Park.  

UK supermarket chain Tesco is taking action to reduce methane emissions from landfills by diverting 100% of its food waste from landfill disposal.  Among other new practices, the company will send the 5,000 tons of post-date meat left over each year by its 2,315 grocery stores and distribution centers to produce electricity–enough to power some 6,000 homes–through biogas harvest.  

Researchers in India have been able to turn solid textile mill sludge into nutrient-rich compost in a 6-month experiment using vermicomposting and manure, according to a report published in the International Journal of Environment and Pollution. The process resulted in increased nitrogen and phosphorous content, both important for plant growth.

The rapid rise of wind turbine development and implementation continues to generate impressive data, big plans and cautious concern.  Some recent highlights:

• The market for small-scale wind turbines (100 kW or less capacity) has grown 78% in 2008 according to The American Wind Energy Association.

The National Parks Conservation Association has drafted a 53-page report describing “a potentially catastrophic loss of animal and plant life” in national parks due to climate change. The report urges the National Park Service to develop an overarching plan to better manage habitat and population shifts.

Transportation Alternatives is requesting submissions for POP.Park, a competition to design a pop-up park for Park(ing) Day in New York City. Since its inception in 2005 by art and design collective Rebar, Park(ing) Day has celebrated pedestrians by transforming parking spaces all over the city into temporary parks.

Zero-net energy buildings are designed to be as energy-efficient as possible and to offset what energy they do use through renewable power generation. Some have already been built, like the Omega Center for Sustainable Living in Rhinebeck, NY.  The state-of-the art education center and natural wastewater treatment facility boasts not only zero-net energy use due to its solar array, but also zero-net water use.

A recent history of relative marginalization by design and construction professions is being overturned, according to an article in Architectural Record, by landscape architecture’s ability to weave sustainability into the built environment.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment of landscape architects is expected to increase 18% to 26% through 2014, faster than the average of all U.S.

A consortium of scientists is at work compiling a Global Digital Soil Properties Map–an up-to-date, spatially-referenced soil information tool that can communicate clearly across a range of users and technologies–with the support of an $18 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF44p7FG2AQ&feature=channel&w=507&h=370]

The Science Barge is a touring greenhouse that showcases techniques in sustainable agriculture.  All the energy used by the barge is produced by solar panels, wind turbines and biofuels, and the water used for irrigation comes from stormwater or purified river water.

Another poster child for the reclamation of disturbed lands: AMD&ART Park in Vintondale, PA.  By the mid-’90s, coal mining in this part of Appalachia had resulted in severe acid mine drainage (AMD) into waterways and general public resignation to a major environmental hazard. 

The WRT/Marpillero Pollak-designed infrastructure and public space project that we wrote about in June has broken ground in Long Island City, Queens.

There are exciting green roof projects emerging all over New York City these days: the experimental setups at the Parks Five Borough facility that we visited last month; The US Postal Service’s brand new 2.4-acre installation of native, drought-resistant plants–reportedly the largest green roof in the country–atop their Manhattan mail processing facility; the green roof farm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which has been hosting volunteers and giving lectures since opening this spring.