Is Garbage a Product of Bad Design?
A team of architects and planners has set out to prove that heaps of waste aren’t an immutable part of a city’s topography.
New York City is an island of imported goods. The city’s main export, though, is trash.
The Department of Sanitation (DSNY) heaves more than 12,000 tons of waste each day; private haulers are conscripted to lug some festering freight, too. Though 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’s a quality of life issue on the ground. With bags heaped high, curbs and sidewalks 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. “Hot garbage wind, and other things that smell in the summer,” one Gothamist headline declared in 2016. On a list of “22 Smells New Yorkers Will Never Forget,” 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’t an immutable part of the city’s topography, and enlisted designers and officials to engineer possible solutions. The Zero Waste Design Guidelines, released this week, are the fruits of this messy labor.
The guidelines, backed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Center for Architecture, offer a preliminary and highly customizable blueprint for how New York could grapple with its daunting piles of detritus—and 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’s larger “One New York” plan, which outlines an ambitious agenda for broad sustainability and resilience measures.
Since landfill-clogging waste releases methane gas, it’s an obstacle to the administration’s pledge to drastically curb emissions—a commitment that officials cast as a defiant response to federal fumbling of the Paris agreement. “Better designed, more effective, and more intentional waste management
is a necessary part of the City’s effort to meet its climate goals,” said Mark Chambers, director of the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, in a statement about the guidelines. And that’s 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’ve adapted the street for bikes and pedestrians, and to siphon stormwater, says Clare Miflin, a partner at Kiss + Cathcart, Architects and the project’s lead author. Moreover, Miflin says, architects are already concerned about waste—both 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. “Nobody’s applying design to waste,” Miflin says.
In fact, waste is a surprisingly fundamental planning issue. “It’s often considered operational, or a hygiene issue, not a land-use issue,” says Juliette Spertus of the infrastructure planning firm Closed Loops, who collaborated on the report. “But it’s something that stored and has a presence.”
Miflin has experienced that oversight in buildings she’s designed. She learned that the trash facility in one of her buildings wasn’t working for the building’s super, who had to duck to get out of the way of glass toppling down the chute.
Through a series of case studies, the guidelines propose best practices for anticipating and dealing with waste inside residential, commercial, and institutional buildings and on streets—and suggest prioritizing a waste-management plan while a building project is still in its zygote phase. First, conceptualize projects with waste in mind: Does it need a chute, or a compactor? Then, consider how waste will be shuttled through a building, stored, and conveyed to haulers.
Miflin and her collaborators worked with the New York City Housing Authority and other city partners to study existing protocols in various buildings, including Manhattan’s 11,250-unit Stuy Town apartment complex, the largest development piloting the DSNY’s curbside compost program. The complex has retrofitted each of the bins with magnetic closures to stave off odors and vermin.
In another case study, Miflin profiles Martin Robertson, a building manager in Harlem who functions as a kind of compost concierge: Residents drop off their caddy of organic waste, and he consolidates it, washes out the containers, and returns them. This way, he sidesteps the unsavory problem of storing organics in a small, unventilated room.
A one-size-fits-all approach won’t work across various typologies of buildings, but the guidelines include a waste calculator, which architects can use to gauge what the waste burden might be, based on a building’s density.
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