National News

Trash Disposal Needs Design?

NEW YORK — 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.

Posted Updated

By
Tim McKeough
, New York Times

NEW YORK — 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 the Zero Waste Design Guidelines, on display through Sept. 1 at the Center for Architecture, is about precisely that: the varied and often messy ways that New Yorkers deal with their trash and recycling.

The guidelines — and the exhibit — are meant to get residents, landlords, building owners, architects and developers focused on the effort to reduce waste and increase recycling. (The guidelines were developed by American Institute of Architects New York; Kiss + Cathcart, Architects; ClosedLoops; and Foodprint Group; with support from the Rockefeller Foundation.)

“There are a bunch of steps that have to happen before waste rolls away,” said Andrew Blum, curator of the exhibition. “At each of those steps, there’s some kind of design moment, whether it’s the chute room in a building, the sorter in a restaurant or office, the person bagging and sorting the waste and if they have room to do it properly, and bringing it out to the curb while making sure it’s separated.”

The hope is that focusing on each of these design moments will make for more efficient handling and sorting of waste, from the time residents throw out their trash to when the city picks it up. Some New York City buildings already have inventive solutions, like the Harlem condo that provides valet composting service or the box breakdown station in Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan, commonly known as Stuy Town, that makes it easier for residents to collapse their cardboard boxes.

Under the city’s OneNYC plan, New York aims to reduce the amount of refuse collected by the Department of Sanitation by 90 percent by 2030, from a 2005 baseline. The challenge is clear: “We only capture 50 percent of the recyclables,” said Bridget Anderson, deputy commissioner for recycling and sustainability at the Department of Sanitation. “A large part of why we don’t capture more of the recycling is design and the fact that it’s not convenient to recycle in many buildings.”

Of the roughly 12,000 tons of trash the sanitation department collects every day from homes and institutions (commercial waste is collected by private haulers), only about 2,000 are diverted for recycling. A small amount of organic material suitable for composting — 100 tons or so — is also diverted from landfills, although organic material represents about a third of all waste collected by the city. The rest is treated as refuse.

In search of best practices, the authors of the design guidelines followed the waste trail through more than 40 buildings, from the service corridors of prewar co-ops to the triple chutes (for refuse; paper; and metal, glass and plastic) of newer towers.

“It was eye-opening,” said Clare Miflin, one of the authors, who worked at Kiss + Cathcart when the guidelines were developed and now runs the design consulting company Woven.

They found trash rooms bursting with cardboard, elevators and exits blocked by bags of recycling, trash chutes with pest problems, circuitous routes from trash storage to curb, sidewalks piled with mountains of garbage bags and ad hoc procedures that created friction at every turn.

Because the flow of waste is often treated as a low-priority item in the design of new buildings and older buildings were never constructed to handle recycling, building employees are often left to figure things out for themselves. Nevertheless, the authors found shining examples buried in the muck.

“In places where they have thought about waste, it’s inspiring,” Miflin said. “In some buildings, there’s amazing creativity at every level.” One of those places is Strivers Gardens, a 170-unit condominium at 300 W. 135th St. built in 2005, where Martin Robertson, the facilities manager, hopes to make waste disposal as painless as possible for residents, while maximizing participation in recycling.

After arriving at the building in 2013 and with the support of the board, Robertson introduced textile and electronic waste recycling containers in the basement in 2015, and an organics collection program in 2016.

Residents can buy a countertop stainless-steel compost bin with a charcoal filter from the building for $35 and use a valet service to have it emptied by staff as often as needed. (Residents can also empty any type of bin in basement collection containers themselves.)

“You can leave it at the front desk when you leave for work,” Robertson said. “We’ll empty it, wash it out and leave it for you to pick up when you come back in.”

Diverting some of the building’s organic waste has allowed management to cut the frequency of trash chute cleanings in half, Robertson said, and helps keep compactor rooms odor free.

When residents leave large boxes in the trash rooms on individual floors that interfere with other people accessing recycling bins, they receive a written reminder of the building’s policies and, if the behavior continues, are fined. Each compactor bag is also labeled with the initials of the employee who prepared it, so any problems can be addressed.

“It’s to support the future of our planet,” Robertson said. “We’re trendsetters in New York. We do set the example, so I definitely want to be part of it.”

At Stuy Town, building employees have experimented with various methods of encouraging the development’s approximately 30,000 residents to recycle more, under the leadership of Rei Moya, the resident manager.

To encourage residents to use an organics collection program that was started in 2016, the development gives residents individual countertop compost bins with compostable bags that can be dropped in sanitation department collection bins in the basement recycling center of each building. (The buckets and bags are distributed for free at the Stuy Town Greenmarket on Sundays.)

“We learned that you have to make it convenient and easy,” said Steven Gregware, the director of environmental services, who estimated that Stuy Town now diverts about 20 percent of its organic waste, or about 5 tons a week, from refuse.

When cardboard began to overwhelm Stuy Town’s recycling centers, a porter created a prototypical box breakdown station that allowed residents to process their cardboard, a solution that will soon be rolled out in other buildings.

A number of the city’s largest developers, including Vornado Realty Trust, Related and the Durst Organization, have also been working to make recycling and organics collection a more integral part of the way their buildings run.

Durst, for instance, introduced a building-wide organics collection program at the Helena 57 West rental tower in 2013, including individual countertop buckets that can be emptied into collection bins on each floor and education packets for new residents.

After expanding the program to three additional residential buildings — Frank 57 West, Via 57 West and EOS at 100 W. 31st St. — the company diverted 48 tons of compostable materials from landfills last year, said Jordan Barowitz, vice president of public affairs.

If you are suddenly feeling guilty about that time you tossed recyclable material in the trash because you could not find a recycling bin, do not fret: The system, or lack thereof, may be partially to blame.

“You’re not a bad person — that’s just the nature of how humans behave,” said Anderson of the sanitation department. “We want to find ways of designing buildings and spaces that make it as convenient, if not more convenient, to divert the useful parts of the waste stream.”

Copyright 2024 New York Times News Service. All rights reserved.