A former Chicago meatpacking plant becomes a self-sustaining vertical farm

23 April 2012
By Julie Ma

Had Willy Wonka had been fascinated by industrial ecology instead of cocoa beans, his factory may have looked something like The Plant, Chicago’s first entirely self-sustaining "vertical farm."

The Plant occupies a former meatpacking plant and slaughterhouse in the Union Stock Yards, transforming a huge brick building that once specialized in bringing red meat to the masses into a green space all about urban farming without waste. The interior looks like something straight out of a scientific-environmental fantasy.

Tenants include aquaponic farms (think vegetables on water beds flourishing under colored UV lights), a tilapia fish farm, beer and Kombucha tea breweries, a mushroom garden, and a host of independent bakers and caterers that will work together in a communal kitchen space. Future plans include living walls and rooftop gardens.

But the most ambitious part of the building is its focus on producing "net-zero waste" in its 93,500-square-foot space. Spent grains from the beer brewery will feed the tilapia. The waste produced by the fish will feed the mushroom garden or be converted nitrates to feed the hydroponic plants. Those plants will clean the water through natural processes and be cycled back into the fish tanks. Taken together, the system will make the building completely self-sustainable. With the help of a few machines, including an anaerobic digester (similar to a waste-eating mechanical "stomach" that produces biogas) and a combined heat and power system, the building hopes to go off the grid within the next four years.

“Industrial ecology—the concept of using other people’s waste as input—is fascinating. In nature, there’s no waste, but there is so much waste in human consumption and development,” says Melanie Hoekstra, The Plant's director of operations. “This is an obvious problem that we can resolve with a building that can do so many things. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s really close.” […]

A Former Chicago Meatpacking Plant Becomes a Self-Sustaining Vertical Farm

Technorati Tags: North America,agriculture,green agriculture,green architecture,permaculture,recycling,urban agriculture

Bottled water sales dry up; industry asks ‘why?’

Consumer backlash begins to bite, but recession also likely to blame

By Jennifer Alsever
msnbc.com contributor
updated 9:08 a.m. PT, Fri., Dec . 18, 2009

Heather Lewis was wracked with guilt when she realized she was addicted to the bottle.

Bottled water, that is.

At her worst, she said she went through five plastic bottles of water a day nearly every day for two years.

“It was appalling,” said Lewis, an architect from Louisville, Colo. “I felt like Aquafina’s trained monkey.”

But one day in January, as she gazed at the piles of plastic in her recycling bin, she decided to quit. “It was a cumulative sense of responsibility that made me do it,” Lewis said

Lewis is part of a bigger backlash against bottled water happening across the nation, and after decades of growth, the $11 billion industry is stuttering.

After steady expansion that saw U.S. per capita consumption grow from less than two gallons a year to a peak of 29 in 2007, bottled water sales slipped 3.2 percent in 2008 and are projected to dip another 2 percent this year, according to estimates by the Beverage Marketing Corporation, a New York research and consulting firm.

The primary cause of the decline is hotly contested. …

Bottled water sales dry up; industry asks ‘why?’

Technorati Tags: pollution,plastic,recycling

Alanis Morissette and Woody Harrelson launch RECO Eco jeans

 

How harmful are your jeans? If they’re made of cotton, they most likely went through a process that included nasty pesticides, polluting dyes and waste-generating production before you decided to put them on your legs. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Singer Alanis Morissette and actor Woody Harrelson have teamed up to bring us Reco Jeans, which are made with 50% recycled denim. That might not seem like a lot - ideally it would be 100%, but Reco is one of the only jeans companies that has been able to get it to even that level. …

Bid here>

Alanis Morissette and Woody Harrelson Launch RECO Eco Jeans!

Technorati Tags: recycling

Offices built out of cardboard for nothing

Photos by Joachim Baan. We have showed cardboard offices before, but Alrik Koudenburg, together with Joost van Bleiswijk, have built an incredible one for creative firm Nothing. They say: "The idea being, to create an office...by using the most Nothing building material we could find." ...

Offices Built out of Cardboard for Nothing

Technorati Tags: green construction,recycling

California tables recycling law

James Murray, BusinessGreen, Friday 6 March 2009 at 00:15:00

New legislation could introduce extended producer responsibility to Californian firms

Firms in California could soon be legally obliged to devise comprehensive plans to minimise waste and improve the recyclability of their products, under new legislation currently before the State Assembly....

California tables recycling law

Technorati Tags: recycling,California

Recycling goes from boom to bust as economy stalls

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) -- Norm Steenstra's budgeting worries mount with each new load of cardboard, aluminum cans and plastics jugs dumped at West Virginia's largest county recycling center.

Faced with a dramatic slump in the recycling market, the director of the Kanawha County Solid Waste Authority has cut 20 of his 24 employees' work week to four days from five, shuttered six of the authority's drop-off stations and is urging residents to hoard their recyclables after informing municipalities with curbside recycling programs that the center will accept only paper until further notice.

''The market is just not there anymore,'' Steenstra said.

Just months after riding an incredible high, the recycling market has tanked almost in lockstep with the global economic meltdown. As consumer demand for autos, appliances and new homes dropped, so did the steel and pulp mills' demand for scrap, paper and other recyclables.

Cardboard that sold for about $135 a ton in September is now going for $35 a ton. Plastic bottles have fallen from 25 cents to 2 cents a pound. Aluminum cans dropped nearly half to about 40 cents a pound, and scrap metal tumbled from $525 a gross ton to about $100.

Recycling Goes From Boom to Bust as Economy Stalls

Technorati Tags: recycling