A recycling plant slated for Brooklyn promises to look—and function—a lot better than your run-of-the-mill trash sorting facility.
The plant, to be built on a 10-acre pier facing Manhattan in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood, will not have the typical chain-link fence and barbed wire security arrangement. Instead, the edge facing the land will sport a vine-covered “green fence,” made of metal decking and metal mesh.
Nor will the structures themselves be the common prefabricated warehouse buildings. The plant’s multiple sorting areas will be under shaped aluminum roofs. And mesh above 20-foot-high concrete walls will keep dust and particles from escaping.
“It will be aesthetically pleasing, environmentally responsive, and responsive to the community,” says Mark Yoes, principal with Manhattan-based Weisz + Yoes Architecture, which developed the still-conceptual plan, unveiled with much fanfare by the Bloomberg administration in September.
 The planned recycling plant for Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood, viewed from Manhattan. |
The $45-million plant is being developed by New York-based Hugo Neu Corp., which won a 20-year contract this month through a request-for-proposals process from the city. The long-term contract helped to incent the company to build a permanent, highly automated plant. Hugo Neu hopes to start construction next summer and the plant is expected to start recycling all of the city’s residential metal, glass and plastic by 2008.
Hugo Neu, a recycling company that is one of the country’s biggest scrap metal firms, recycled most of the steel from the destroyed World Trade Center. The company will pay for the engineering, equipment, buildings and construction of the recycling plant, which will cost about $25 million, a spokeswoman said. The city has pledged $20 million for improvements like dredging and bulkhead reconstruction. The deal signals an about-face for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who two years ago shelved most of the city’s recycling to save money before incrementally replacing it. And the Brooklyn facility comes just a few years after Australian recycling company Visy Industries won a large city paper-recycling contract and built a $250 million plant on Staten Island.
While the new plant is not exactly the right canvas for a design masterpiece, Hugo Neu and its architect are thinking outside the bin. “Typically, these kinds of things are done with basically no architectural input; they’re just huge sheds,” says Yoes. “We are trying to take it beyond that level.”
The plant concept has won the approval of community and environmental groups. One reason is its situation on the pier: 90% of the recyclable material will be transported by barges, which will limit congestion and pollution caused by fleets of trucks lining up to dump their waste.
Its architecture, with elements like bowstring trusses and billowing roof forms, will provide a “harbor vocabulary,” says Yoes. In addition, the multiple modules will correspond to the facility’s different functions. “We are trying to give some architectural articulation and have massing relate to what’s happening functionally,” he explains.
The plant will have a heavy green component aside from its recycling role. Three-quarters of the processing will take place under roof, reducing the emission of dust and particulates. It will even have a roof extending over the water so that barges will unload in the interior of the facility.
The structures are to be inflected to bring in natural light and ventilation, and designed to facilitate the collection of rainwater, which can be used for washing vehicles and other purposes. In addition, a portion of the roof surface is to have photovoltaics, which could create enough energy to power the planned visitor center and administration building, according to Yoes.
For inspiration, the architects studied recycling plants in the Netherlands, where a shortage of land forces recycling plants indoors. “Europe is ahead of us, especially in terms of doing it on urban sites and in terms of education,” Yoes says. The Slatin Report. The company is an independent company that covers financial trends, urban and suburban planning and development, corporate real estate strategies, and architecture and design..