Staff Writer
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| Present Architecture looks to make dumpsters a thing of the past. |
According to Huffington Post New York City
produces more than 14 million tons of trash per year. New York City’s
population is 8.33 million people, which means each person produces about 1.68
tons of trash every year. Most of this trash goes to landfills, but Present Architecture is trying to reduce the amount of
trash going to landfills by creating an environmentally friendly solution
called Green Loop. Green Loop is a multi-layered composting facility, which
will double as either a rooftop park or a roof top garden. Trucks will bring
the organic waste from the streets of New York to these facilities rather than
landfills. There will be ten islands placed on the waterfront of the five New
York boroughs.
This idea is still in very early development and
will require a lot of money, but the project leaders believe that the capital
is there. “It won't be cheap, but if you
consider that NYC is spending over $300 million every year to truck waste out
of the city to landfills, it's possible that these facilities could start to
make financial sense over time,” Evan Erlebacher and Andre Guimond, two of the
project's leaders, told The Huffington Post.
These project leaders have
thought of solutions to many negative drawbacks including smell. "This is
an industrial processing facility, so there are multiple options for
eliminating smell. Temperature, oxygen levels and composition of compost all
affect odor, and these things can be monitored in an industrial facility.
Composting can be done in a closed system to reduce smell, and bio-filters are
also an effective way to reduce airborne odors. This kind of composting
facility is very different from your average backyard compost heap,"
Erlebacher and Guimond said. This project will also create many jobs for the
people from New York ranging from constructing the facilities to working in
them. “A large construction project like this would definitely keep people busy
for a while. And then once the facilities are up and running, they would need
people to manage and operate them," Erlebacher and Guimond said.
