The Solaire is one of the city’s first buildings to collect organicsin equal convenience locations. Each floor has a waste room with a trash chute and separate bins for metal, plastic, glass and paper. The rooms are serviced several times a day, with recycling and organics removedas required. See Case Study pdf.
The Grand Millennium has a bisorter and turntable system. Residents use the control panel alongside the chute door to choose MGP, trash or paper which travel through the same chute. A bisorter in the cellar, at the chute’s base, sends the trash into a vertical compactor and the recyclable streams into a six-bin turntable system. […]
Avalon Fort Greene, designed by Perkins Eastman Architectsand completed in 2010, is one of many new high-rises in downtown Brooklyn. This 41-story luxury rental building is unusual, though,in that the developer and property management company Avalonbay Communities forgoes DSNY collection, opting instead to pay a private hauler to remove waste from the 636-unit building.The building […]
To date, StuyTown is the largest housing development participatingin DSNY’s curbside organics pilot. Each building has compost bins on the ground floor, which are emptied three times a week; collecting over five tons of compost per week. Although this is a substantial amount, calculations based on average waste generation for NYC indicate that this is […]
Gravity chutes are rare in Paris, as are waste rooms on residential floors. Instead, residents bring discards to bins in a waste room or courtyardat street level, even in brand-new developments. See Case Study pdf.
Architects—even those who don’t call themselves super-green—by now are obliged to design buildings that conserve energy and water. But do they expect to create structures that allow occupants to better manage and reduce the waste they produce? Not so much. Nevertheless, that is what a number of zero waste champions say is needed. From Architectural […]
As the season of steaming garbage piles sets in, New York’s Center for Architecture is urging designers to implement a more circular approach to waste, from Fast Company As more than 25,000 architects convene in New York City this week for the annual AIA Conference and Expo—the largest architecture convention in the U.S., hosted by a […]
A new exhibition looks at how buildings can make recycling easier, from New York Times An apartment building’s trash disposal system is seldom on its amenities list. Nor are prospective buyers or renters likely to ask about things like garbage or recycling methods. But “Designing Waste: Strategies for a Zero Waste City,” an exhibition on […]
Cornell University, 2019 Preston H. Thomas Memorial Symposium. The planet has finite resources, yet we design and build as if our materials are unlimited. In fact, the earth’s crust contains less than 20 years of copper, tin, and zinc, at the current rate of mining. Sand, a vital aggregate in cement, is rapidly depleting. Architects […]