New York City is an island of imported goods. The city’s main export, though, is trash. The city’s 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 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. “Hot garbage wind, and other things that smell in the summer,” read one Gothamist headline 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 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 the federal move away from 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 the architecture firm Kiss + Cathcart and the report’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 planning issue that has a lot to do with how a city uses its space. “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’s stored and has a presence.”

To read the full story, visit https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/10/cities-garbage-design/543387/.

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