Sims Municipal Recycling Facility Definition
Situated on a pier in the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, Sims Municipal Recycling's 11-acre Sunset Park materials recovery facility processes about 16,000. Sims wanted to add a dedicated educational center where students and adults could delve more deeply into what it really means to recycle, says. Sims Municipal Recycling processes a variety of curbside municipal materials, including metal, glass, plastic and paper.
Recycling in New York is a scrappy business. Billions have gone toward building water tunnels, power plants, subways and sewage treatment facilities, but little toward an infrastructure of recycling. In turn, New Yorkers have been slow to separate bottles and cans the way they flip a light switch or swipe a MetroCard: Recycling remains less an everyday fact of life than a do-good option, like tipping the mail carrier at the holidays.
But a Sims Municipal Recycling Facility will open shortly at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal in Sunset Park. The city’s first big, state-of-the-art plant for processing discarded plastic, metals and glass, it promises jobs to nearby residents and, as the cost of exporting garbage out of state rises, some savings for the city.
Did I mention that it’s an architectural keeper? No, it doesn’t resemble a giant egret or stegosaurus skeleton, or sport flying titanium panels. And its designer didn’t cost some obscene premium. The facility is understated, well proportioned and well planned — elegant, actually, and not just for a garbage site. It is an ensemble of modernist boxes squeezing art, and even a little drama, from a relatively meager design budget. Sanitation projects are usually the ultimate NIMBY flash point. This one makes a good case for the social and economic benefits of design — and for old-fashioned industrial waterfront development as an abiding urban virtue.
Barges loaded with metals, glass and plastic from the five boroughs will converge on the site, cutting, Sims estimates, about 250,000 miles that sanitation trucks now travel around town, a windfall for city air quality and traffic congestion. The project started a decade ago. The Sanitation Department was seeking a long-term recycling partner. Sims Municipal Recycling won the job. It proposed to build a plant on an 11-acre decrepit pier, a former police tow pound, at the Marine Terminal. The facility would handle most of the city’s recyclables, up to 20,000 tons a month, and include an education center that wasn’t just a repurposed closet with an instructional video to torture captive schoolchildren.
The city committed to fixing up the pier. Sims, in turn, reviewed projected sea-level rise — this was years before Hurricane Sandy — and decided to elevate vulnerable parts of the site by up to four feet above city requirements (using recycled glass and crushed rock from the Second Avenue subway project). Spending the additional $1 million for that purpose kept the pier dry last year when Sandy’s 12-foot surge flooded nearby streets and crippled other waterfront businesses.
And instead of letting engineers design the plant, as often happens at an industrial site, Sims hired Selldorf Architects, a glamorous New York firm known for doing Chelsea art galleries and cultural institutions. This was not an unprecedented move. The city enlisted Ennead Architects to design the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Even so, it was something akin to A&E getting Pierre Boulez to compose a soundtrack for “Duck Dynasty.”
The idea?
Partly to game the public review process, but also to build a well-designed plant — welcoming to the public, beckoning from the waterfront.
Recycling is a high-minded although notoriously low-margin, capital-intensive, volume-based industry, dependent on increasing public participation. So the plant needed to be a good citizen and neighbor. At the same time, it had to function as an advertisement for itself.
Selldorf was, in retrospect, an inspired choice. The German-born Annabelle Selldorf runs the firm, which stresses crisp lines, elegant volumes and a clean, formal vocabulary in which nothing goes to waste.
Devising a site plan, Ms. Selldorf knew that the main, shedlike L-shaped building with all the recycling equipment had to hug the southern edge of the pier, where barges would unload. That meant the northern edge could become a public-friendly zone, with the education and visitors center, trees, bioswales, a grassy entrance and parking for school buses. The center, including offices, a cafeteria, classrooms and a terrace with a killer view over the harbor, became a light-filled, three-story shoe box, parallel with the pier.
The geometry of buildings produced a satisfying suite of courtyards, a mini-cityscape. The broad pitched roof suspended over the main building creates a clerestory for light and air. For visitors, the drama of the architecture unfolds moving through it: a sky-high catwalk linking the visitors center to the main building leads to a bird’s-eye view of the mountain of recycling machines. Cranes, trucks and barges disgorge the city’s discards below; the machines sort and crush the maelstrom.
It’s bound to be an awesome spectacle.
In its stripped-down aesthetic, the plant brings to mind factories in Germany or Norway, where recycling is routine and good design integral to the social compact. An enormous rooftop solar array that Sims says is the largest in the city, helps power the facility. Mussels dangle on ropes from the pier, birds patrol the shore, a wind turbine is on its way.
Will it inspire people to recycle?
That’s the $110 million bet. New York City taxpayers invested $60 million in the site; Sims, $50 million. Eventually, the city will own the whole kit and caboodle. Architecture added 1 percent to the final bill, estimates Sims’s general manager, Tom Outerbridge, a pittance considering the fees for many public projects involving front-rank architects. Ms. Selldorf told me that she appreciated the tight fiscal leash, as all good artists want constraints.
She used recycled steel. Materials are off-the-shelf. Instead of a clunky corrugation, the default skin for warehouses, she opted for a thinner, rounded paneling (modest extra cost), which shimmers in the light. She grouped downspouts to syncopate one facade and flipped the skeleton (the beams and struts) from inside the walls to the outside on part of the main building to give its flesh some bones.
Municipal Recycling Programs
Urban waterfront projects these days foretell a better quality of life. They boast parks and kayak launches, bike paths and luxury apartments.
Sims Municipal Recycling Brooklyn
But the waterfront still must serve the city’s infrastructure, otherwise even more industry moves by truck through the streets. Keeping industry on the waterfront improves quality of life, too.
That the new Sims plant was built at all is testament to decades of perseverance by environmentalists, and to the power of local government in this era of Washington gridlock. That it adds an improbable grace note to a gritty stretch of Brooklyn waterfront can be chalked up to enlightened industry harnessing the power of architecture.
Field Visit, SIMS Municipal Recycling Facility
Sean MacDonald,https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/groups/econ2505-env-econ-fa2015/
Department of Social Science, School of Arts and Sciences
Municipal Recycling Facility
ECON 2505 Environmental Economics, https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/macdonald-mincyteecon2505fall2015/welcome-to-environmental-economics/
Activity Description: Provide a brief description of the activity
Students visited the facility, located on the Brooklyn waterfront in Sunset Park, to get a sense of how to make connections between conducting a research project and observing a site related to research in practice. They were encouraged to think of questions before the visit about the workings of the recycling process, as well as the site’s renewable energy system and artificial reef projects.
Learning Goals: What do you aim to achieve with this activity?
1. Have students document their impressions, thoughts and photographs and to post and share these on Open Lab.
2. Facilitate development of a framework for how to relate place-based research to the semester research project.
3. Make connections between local sustainable environmental practices and their relationship to the economic choices of individuals and businesses.
Timing: At what point in the lesson or semester do you use this activity? How much classroom time do you devote to it? How much out-of-class time is expected?
This activity is usually conducted during the 5th or 6th week of classes after students have obtained a grounding in the concept of place-based research, its purposes and its relevance to the overall research project. The visit is scheduled during class time (typically 1 and ½ hours for the tour and time for students to travel to the site and then back to campus.
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Once students have experienced the tour, they are expected to 1) post their informal reflections of new information learned and photographs on the course Open Lab site.
Students are also required to submit a short summary in which they reflect on how the experience could inform their own place-based research
Logistics: What preparation is needed for this activity? What instructions do you give students? Is the activity low-stakes, high-stakes, or something else?
The site visit is scheduled two to three weeks prior to the start of the semester.
Students are prepared for the visit through a brief session on informal interviewing techniques. They are also asked to do some prior research on recycling in New York and other cities, and to familiarize themselves with the SIMS website in particular to get an idea of the scope of their operations. This preparation is designed to get students thinking about questions they may have before they even arrive, while providing a context for how they will conduct place-based research on their own projects.
The activity is high-stakes, as it offers a valuable perspective on what it means to conduct place-based research and how that activity fits with the goal of grounding research in the real world. At the same time, it encourages the process of making a valuable connection to the interdisciplinary focus of the class.
High-Impact Educational Practices: Which of these practices based on George Kuh’s High Impact Educational Practices (and other innovative approaches) does this activity incorporate? Choose all that apply.
Collaborative assignments and projects, Open Digital Pedagogy (the OpenLab), Inter/Multidisciplinary Projects, Undergraduate research, Place-Based Learning, Brooklyn Waterfront
Assessment: How do you assess this activity? What assessment measures do you use? Do you use a VALUE rubric? If not, how did you develop your rubric? Is your course part of the college-wide general education assessment initiative?
A formal rubric is not used for this activity; however, the preliminary process of familiarizing students with the concept of place-based research prior to the trip provides a meaningful framework for students to think critically about their own projects.
The course requirements, research and written assignments stress critical thinking, integration of knowledge across disciplines, and the importance of applying diverse perspectives to the understanding of sustainability as it relates to environmental economics.
Reflection: How well did this activity work in your classroom? Would you repeat it? Why or why not? What challenges did you encounter, and how did you address them? What, if anything, would you change? What did students seem to enjoy about the activity?
The first time I conducted this activity, I was impressed by how much students said they both enjoyed the experience and the extent to which they described something they learned about the recycling process itself. …“As people are becoming aware of their environment recycling programs are becoming popular. Earth cannot sustain current human population at the rate we are extracting resources from it… It’s pretty amazing and fascinating exactly how a bottle on a store shelf can be … recycled into another product… I have always seen recycle[d] garbage placed in various places near supermarkets but I never knew what happens after that.”
Students even make new discoveries about their own communities. One remarked that “Growing up living in Brooklyn along the neighborhoods of Sunset Park and Bay Ridge I never knew the 30th Street Pier in the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal even existed.”
Each semester, the site chosen for the class place-based field visit is changed. The assignment prior to the visit – requiring students to research the site and to think about questions they have – is similar. This process has been valuable in helping students gain some familiarity with the site and in challenging students to think about what more they want to explore and learn.
Overall, the place-based activity has proven to be a valuable means of actively engaging students in the learning process. They are curious, ask thoughtful questions and often come away from the experience with a clearer idea of the value of place-based research for their own projects.
Additional Information: Please share any additional comments and further documentation of the activity – e.g. assignment instructions, rubrics, examples of student work, etc. These could be in the form of PDF or Word files, links to posts or files on the OpenLab, etc.
https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/macdonald-mincyteecon2505fall2015/2015/11/18/sims-municipal-recycling-centeron/
https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/macdonald-mincyteecon2505fall2015/2015/11/17/sims-municipal-recycling-trip-2/