New York City is an island of imported goods. The city鈥檚 main export, though, is trash. The city鈥檚 Department of Sanitation (DSNY) heaves more than聽12,000 tons of waste each day; private haulers are conscripted to lug some festering freight, too. Though聽some organics or recyclables are diverted, most of the debris ends up offloaded in landfills hundreds of miles away.
But before garbage is carted off, it鈥檚 a quality-of-life issue on the ground. With bags heaped high, curbs and sidewalks can become canyons through towering landscapes of rubbish. On humid days, an acrid, prickly smell settles on certain corners, and the festering pylons have given rise to a whole genre of gripes. The noxiousness has become a local character trait. 鈥淗ot garbage wind, and other things that smell in the summer,鈥� read one聽Gothamist headline in 2016. On a list of 鈥�22 Smells New Yorkers Will Never Forget,鈥澛�BuzzFeed offered a more detailed taxonomy of the trash itself, differentiating between the maleficence of recently deposited stacks and the juicy lots that had been marinating, rotting, and baking in the midday sun.
Last year, a cast of collaborators, led by a team of architects and planners, wondered if the problem of trash was partly a design one. They set out to prove that the heaps weren鈥檛 an immutable part of the city鈥檚 topography and enlisted designers and officials to engineer possible solutions. The聽Zero Waste Design Guidelines, released this week, are the fruits of this messy labor.
The guidelines offer a preliminary and highly customizable blueprint for how New York could grapple with its daunting piles of detritus鈥攁nd call on designers and architects to be at the forefront of research and policy to drive the city closer to the goal of sending zero waste to landfills by 2030. That target is one tenet of Mayor Bill de Blasio鈥檚 larger聽鈥淥ne New York鈥� plan, which outlines an ambitious agenda for broad sustainability and resilience measures.
Since landfill-clogging waste releases methane gas, it鈥檚 an obstacle to the administration鈥檚 pledge to聽drastically curb emissions鈥攁 commitment that officials cast as聽a defiant response to the federal move away from the Paris agreement. 鈥淏etter designed, more effective, and more intentional waste management is a necessary part of the City鈥檚 effort to meet its climate goals,鈥� said Mark Chambers, director of the Mayor鈥檚 Office of Sustainability, in a statement about the guidelines. And that鈥檚 where designers and architects come in: rethinking the way people interact with waste from the chute to the street.
Architects have already intervened in complex urban problems such as mobility and resiliency: They鈥檝e adapted the street for bikes and pedestrians, and to siphon stormwater, says Clare Miflin, a partner at the architecture firm Kiss + Cathcart and the report鈥檚 lead author. Moreover, Miflin says, architects are already concerned about waste鈥攂oth the physical castoffs generated during construction and the more abstract problems of inefficient windows, lights, and other energy sucks. But somewhere along the line, trash had slipped through the cracks. 鈥淣obody鈥檚 applying design to waste,鈥� Miflin says.
In fact, waste is a planning issue that has a lot to do with how a city uses its space. 鈥淚t鈥檚 often considered operational, or a hygiene issue, not a land-use issue,鈥� says Juliette Spertus of the infrastructure-planning firm Closed Loops, who collaborated on the report. 鈥淏ut it鈥檚 something that鈥檚 stored and has a presence.鈥�
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