The Case Studies listed here are from the Zero Waste Design Guidelines. We will be developing new case studies from the work of the Center, and collecting case studies from others worldwide. Search case studies by category or name.
Etsy Headquarters, NYC
Etsy’s Brooklyn headquarters occupies 200,000 sq ft of a nine-story building constructed in 1924. The renovation, by Gensler, was designed to be zero waste within both its construction and its ongoing operations. Etsy formalized its zero waste vision in 2017 by publicly announcing their commitment to run zero waste operations globally by 2020. Since then...
Eataly Boston
Every location of the Italian marketplace Eataly, which offers groceries, restaurants and cooking demos, was designed to ease the separation of organics from trash and recycling, thereby allowing waste to move efficiently through the building. And recently, the chain embarked on a plan to optimize recycling at all its sites, starting in Boston. See Case...
Vitry-sur-Seine, France
Vitry-sur-Seine is a diverse city of 90,000 outside Paris where 75%of residents live in apartment buildings, a third of which is public housing. In 2008, as the city embarked on a major urban renewal project to improve conditions in several of its public housing estates and to develop an interurban tramline, Vitry was also revisiting...
The Hague, Netherlands
The Hague is the Netherlands’ third-largest city. Until recently, door- to-door collection of refuse in bags or wheeled bins was the norm, with residents carrying recyclables to shared containers on certain “recycle streets.” The city struggled to keep its narrow streets clean because seagulls pecked open bags left out for collection, strewing garbage and making...
Study of High Line Corridor Pneumatic Waste-Management Initiative, NYC
The High Line Corridor Pneumatic Waste-Management Initiative proposes a third chapter for the High Line in which building staff and cleaning crews from the local business improvement district cart waste to shared containers connected to a 1.5-mile long pneumatic tube attached to the underside of the High Line. Recyclables, organicsand refuse would be pulsed at...
Roosevelt Island, NYC
Roosevelt Island is a planned community of 14,000 in the East River, between Manhattan and Queens. The 1969 master plan by Philip Johnson and John Burgee envisioned a full-service community without cars.28 Tasked with finding a way to remove trash without trucks, engineers installed a pneumatic tube network—the first such system for municipal solid waste in...