Plastic bag breakthrough?

Plastic bags are an environmental bane: they take a really, really long time to decompose in landfills, they’re the largest pollutant in the world’s oceans, and the general the accumulation of plastics is “one of the most ubiquitous and long-lasting recent changes to the surface of our planet.”

Enter Daniel Burd.  The 16-year-old winner of the 2008 Canada-Wide Science Fair has deduced a way to make plastic bags decompose in a matter of months.  Burd mixed together ordinary household chemicals, yeast and water, then added the mixture to ground-up polyethlene plastic bags and dirt.  After three months of bacterial culture growth and further tests on full polyethlene strips, he identified two types of bacteria which, at the right concentration and temperature, can produce 43% degradation of plastic within six weeks.  The byproducts of the process were water and a small amount of carbon dioxide.  He now looks forward to trying the process at an industrial level.

(via WebEcoist)

Pier 57 winning design selected

The Hudson River Park Trust has selected a winning design for its reimagining of Pier 57, near Chelsea on Manhattan’s west side.  LOT-EK’s design makes use of disused shipping containers in the construction of a mixed-use community facility on the 375,000 square-foot pier.  The design includes 170,000 square feet of artisan work space, a 90,000-square-foot ‘Underwater Discovery Center’ for education and exhibits, a rooftop venue for the Tribeca Film Festival, an open-air public market and a 2-acre rooftop park.  Dutch landscape architecture firm West 8 and Beyer Blinder Belle will partner with LOT-EK to design the public green space around and on top of the structure.  The Park Trust and developer Young Woo & Associates haven’t set a date yet for the estimated $210 million project.

(via Inhabitat)

Staten Island rock sculptures, unconcealed

Before PBS Thirteen’s online series The City Concealed featured Freshkills Park, it featured another unusual Staten Island park happening, at Mt. Loretto Unique Area, a state preserve on the island’s southern tip.  Artist Doug  Schwartz has been building pyramids of thousands of rocks, spanning nearly half a mile of beach at Mt. Loretto, since 1996.  Some photos via Forgotten NY here.  The rock cairns are not Schwartz’s only claim to fame; he’s also the Staten Island Zoo’s keeper of weather-prognosticating groundhog Staten Island Chuck.

The college that runs on landfill gas

A 12.7 mile pipeline transports methane from a cogeneration plant in Rochester, NH to the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

Among Treehugger’s 10 greenest colleges in the US is the University of New Hampshire (UNH), the first college in the country to run primarily on landfill gas.  85% of electricity and gas needs on the 5 million square foot campus are met by methane produced at a private, nearby landfill operated by Waste Management and piped to the school from a cogeneration plant.  The $49 million project, called EcoLine, was completed earlier this year and replaced a system that supplied UNH with natural gas.  The new system is expected to pay for itself within the next 10 years and has lowered the school’s carbon emissions to 57% less than its 1990 levels.

Is ecological restoration worth it?

It takes a lot of money to clean up damaged environments, and justifying the cost of expenditure with measurable results hasn’t always been possible.  A new study published in the recent “Restoration Ecology” issue of Science quantifies the impact of ecological restoration projects on levels of biodiversity and ecosystem services in order to provide substance to cost-benefit analysis. Through survey of 89 restored environments worldwide, the study found that biodiversity can increase 44% and ecosystem services 25% through ecological restoration.  Some restoration projects were more successful than others–saltwater marshes, which abound at the Freshkills Park site, fared poorly on scales of both biodiversity and ecosystem services.  In a few cases, restoration was found to have negative effects on one or both measures.  The study may be used to inform land management decisions about allocating resources to restoration projects.

(via Scientific American)

Mary Miss

A large-scale 1973 installation at the Battery Park Landfill, now Battery Park City.

Mary Miss makes site-specific artwork aimed at making abstractions like site history and environmental function tangible to the public.  Her work, from the 1960s through the present, has engaged issues and practices of landscape, architecture, infrastructure and ecology.  She has participated in a number of park design projects, including proposals for New York City’s Riverside Park South and Orange County California’s Great Park.  Her most trafficked work is installed in the Union Square Subway Station, where red frames of varying shapes and sizes call attention to the lost industrial history of the space.

UK supermarket now reuses food waste

UK supermarket chain Tesco is taking action to reduce methane emissions from landfills by diverting 100% of its food waste from landfill disposal.  Among other new practices, the company will send the 5,000 tons of post-date meat left over each year by its 2,315 grocery stores and distribution centers to produce electricity–enough to power some 6,000 homes–through biogas harvest.  As much as this is a step in a positive direction, TreeHugger aptly wonders why Tesco isn’t also trying to reduce its enormous annual surplus of meat, and what the impact is of the emissions required to produce that meat.

Sludge + worms = compost

Researchers in India have been able to turn solid textile mill sludge into nutrient-rich compost in a 6-month experiment using vermicomposting and manure, according to a report published in the International Journal of Environment and Pollution. The process resulted in increased nitrogen and phosphorous content, both important for plant growth. The pilot project indicates that a shift can be made from disposing of the sludge in landfills or incinerators, which can create environmental hazards, to a safer and more natural alternative.

(via GreenBiz)

Wind power catch-up

An offshore wind farm in the Baltic Sea, off the coast of Denmark.

The rapid rise of wind turbine development and implementation continues to generate impressive data, big plans and cautious concern.  Some recent highlights:

• The market for small-scale wind turbines (100 kW or less capacity) has grown 78% in 2008 according to The American Wind Energy Association.
• Meanwhile, a Dutch study has found that small turbines are economically inefficient compared to solar power at the same scale.
• The North Carolina state senate weighs a ban of large turbines from its mountaintops on the premise that they are an aesthetic blight.
• The Long Island – New York City Offshore Wind Project has reached out to developers with a proposed 350 – 700 MW-generating wind farm 13 miles off the coasts of the Rockaway Peninsula, which they hope to connect to the New York State power grid by 2015.

(via Jetson Green, Clean Technia, and  TreeHugger)

National parks need a climate change plan

Density of large trees in Yosemite National Park has declined over the past several decades; climate change is partly to blame. Photo by Zach Schrock

The National Parks Conservation Association has drafted a 53-page report describing “a potentially catastrophic loss of animal and plant life” in national parks due to climate change. The report urges the National Park Service to develop an overarching plan to better manage habitat and population shifts.

Among the ideas proposed is one that is shared by the Freshkills Park master plan: wildlife corridors that enable animals to migrate across parks uninhibited.

(via LA Times)