a reblog covering NYC’s sustainability scene
Posted in Nature, Parks and Open Space, Water on Mar 28th, 2008
For a city set on three islands and a peninsula, few New Yorkers don’t have all that close a connection to our coastline. Maybe this new interactive New York City Water Trail map and guide will help change that. Just launched by the Parks Department, it features 28 spots along our vast waterfront […]
Posted in Health, Parks and Open Space, Politics, Waste, Water on Mar 24th, 2008
Newtown Creek is one of NYC’s dirtiest little secrets. By now, most folks know about the enormous oil spill that still sits stagnant, but if you need a recap, this Mother Jones article from last fall is a great start.
Well there’s some (a little) good news on the Newtown front. There are […]
Posted in Health, Livable Streets, Water on Feb 15th, 2008
The Greenstreet at 110th and Amsterdam helps keep sewage out of city rivers and features a beefed-up, traffic-calming "blockbuster."
It rained yesterday, sending stormwater streaming down New York City streets and through sewer grates. The runoff mixed with wastewater in the system and overloaded treatment facilities, causing raw sewage to spill into the city’s waterways.
Sound like an ecological disaster? It can be triggered by as little as one tenth of an inch of rainfall in one hour. Called Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO), this toxic broth also contains chemicals leached from roofs and pavement. 27 billion gallons of CSO pour into city rivers and bays every year. Until recently, there was no concerted effort to prevent it.
One of the more unsung PlaNYC initiatives aims to drastically reduce CSO, in part by managing streets more wisely. Certain traffic calming measures, it turns out, can not only make streets more ped-friendly, but also help make the city’s rivers clean enough to swim in. To accomplish this, PlaNYC calls for retooling the Parks Department’s Greenstreets program, and we are starting to see the results.
At their best, Greenstreets — the pint-sized green spaces that Parks began planting in 1996 — have served as modest traffic-calming measures, displacing asphalt with patches of greenery that send cues to slow down. The new breed goes a few steps further: They combine advanced stormwater capture techniques with more overt traffic-calming devices, like neckdowns and bulb-outs.
Posted in Business, Climate Change, Community, Design, Energy, Environmental Justice, Food, Green Building, Health, Lifestyle, Livable Streets, Parks and Open Space, Politics, Technology, Transportation, Waste, Water on Feb 13th, 2008
Popular Science ranks the country’s 50 Greenest Cities in its latest issue and New York comes in at a respectable #20, despite being beaten out by Boston and Chicago. The magazine used raw data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Geographic Society’s Green Guide, which collected government statics and survey data across 30 different sustainability categories. Pop Sci then distributed these statistics across four broad categories: electricity, transportation, green living, and recycling and green perspective. Cities earned points for items such as their number of LEED-certified buildings, how much energy they draw from renewable sources, how many commuters use public transportation or carpool, and how much land they devote to public green space.
Says NRDC:
The New York City Council passed legislation today to tackle the sewage overflowproblem in the City’s overburdened sewer system. The legislation advances the implementation of green design elements, which mimic nature’s own filtering systems, into the City’s existing streets, parks, and other public spaces and into existing and new development projects.
By adopting ‘green infrastructure’ […]
Greenpoint residents met last week with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (”DEP”) to beg for a full-scale overhaul of Newtown Creek, an offshoot of the East River that divides Brooklyn and Queens. New York’s largest wastewater treatment plant is located on the grimy creek’s bank, and in the summer, the stench from the plant wafts for miles. The Queens Ledger reported that DEP Commissioner Emily Lloyd hopes to make a series of environmental upgrades in order to bring the plant into compliance with the federal Clean Water Act, including covering all areas where sewage is exposed to the air and building new chlorination tanks.
Source control strategies that decrease the amount of stormwater entering the wastewater treatment system are valuable tools to reduce the occurrence and volume of CSOs and other stormwater discharges. Effective source control strategies also provide other benefits, such as decreased energy consumption and economic benefits associated with supporting local markets for source control strategies. The Council finds that the development and implementation of a sustainable stormwater management plan is vital to improve water quality in the City and thereby better protect the public health through the restoration and protection of the ecological health of the City’s waterbodies and to the enhanced use and enjoyment of the City’s waterbodies for recreational activities.
Among the strategies to be considered in drawing up the plans are green roofs, permeable pavement, cisterns and rain barrels, and tree/vegetative cover. This is all great news for the city and its waterways, which currently absorb up to 27 billion gallons of untreated waste water each year via CSOs. It’s also great news for beaches and other water-based recreational opportunities as part of the plan will include a more comprehensive system of warnings to protect public health when CSOs do happen.
Of course, legislation like this doesn’t happen without the hard work of a lot of dedicated people, in this case the folks at the S.W.I.M. coalition. Congratulations to them for everything they did to get this legislation passed.
For more information on water resources, check out our East River resource page. And if you haven’t already, take a look at our plans for Solar 2, which will include many water-saving and recycling techniques.