sustainableflatbush.org

Rebecca’s container gardening demonstration

Last Sunday’s event, “Greening Flatbush: Garden Where You Are” was a huge success! The Sustainable Flatbush Gardening Committee assembled a stellar program of speakers and demonstrations on topics including Container Gardening, Urban Composting, Street Trees, Permaculture and more.

Mela and Sandra talk trees

Karla advocates for worm composting

We can’t wait for spring to get our hands dirty and start planting up the neighborhood!

Lots of interesting local developments occurred during my two-week foray into the world of Carnaval in Brazil (still catching up!), and here’s one of my favorites: NYC is seeing the light on addressing the Combined Sewer Overflow problem – where even a minor rainfall can send sewage into our waterways and beaches – through progressive and sustainable practices. The City Council passed legislation to create a Sustainable Stormwater Management Plan, and it looks like they’ve been listening to the right people (as opposed to following the Department of Environmental Protection’s more expensive and less effective end-of-pipe plans designed to deal with sewer overflow after it occurs). Environmental organization Riverkeeper has previously presented a report showing that the most cost-efficient way to mitigate excess stormwater is by capturing it at the source through simple infrastructure such as parks, trees, green roofs and rainwater collection systems. How great is it when the least expensive solution to a problem also provides significant quality-of-life benefits?

“This local law is good for the City’s environment and makes sound economic sense,” said Basil Seggos, Riverkeeper’s Chief Investigator. “By regarding stormwater as a resource for irrigating the landscape, we not only improve water quality, but also capture all the added economic benefits of green infrastructure, including cooler streets, reduced energy costs (by reducing building cooling needs), cleaner air, sequestration and reduction of global warming pollution, flood mitigation, and more livable communities.”

Follow the link below to read the complete press release…
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NY Times’ City Room blog continues its Q&A series with experts on various urban planning issues (the first was with recently-appointed Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan). For the garbage/recycling geeks among us (I include myself here), this is a very interesting read.

And if we are going to think that expansively about how we might use our streetscape, we might go even further, to imagine a few parking spaces per building permanently turned into “eco-spaces,” with islands bulging into the streets to calm traffic, with plantings to absorb rainfall that would otherwise flow into the sewers and to absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen, perhaps with small-scale rat-proofed composting receptacles, or igloos for depositing recyclables, or …. the mind reels.

YES! And this is only Part One!

Answers From the Garbage Expert

By The New York Times

 

Benjamin Miller (Nancy Siesel/The New York Times)

Benjamin Miller, an expert on the history of New York City’s trash, is taking questions from readers this week. This is his first set of answers.

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I attended this seminar two years ago, and it completely changed my thinking about water use. Hint: if you think you know how much water a leaky toilet wastes, think again!

Water Conservation: Quench Your Thirst for Information
What better way to jumpstart a sustainable summer than to learn about water conservation! Join us in our upcoming forum where we will discuss how to use water efficiently and focus on water conservation technology readily available for both residential and commercial use. Our speaker will provide a combination of practical points for homeowners and specification information for design professionals from a regional and global perspective.

When: Wednesday, July 18, 2007, 6:30-8:00 pm

Where: Church Street School for Music & Art
74 Warren Street, Manhattan
1,2,3,A,C trains to Chambers Street; R,W trains to City Hall

Speaker: Warren C. Liebold, Director, Technical Services/Conservation, Bureau of Customer Services, New York City Department of Environmental Protection

This article in Fast Company magazine, “Message In A Bottle” by Charles Fishman, brings the bottled water discussion to another level. While I highly recommend reading the entire article, here are a few selected bits:

• Bottled water is the food phenomenon of our times. We–a generation raised on tap water and water fountains–drink a billion bottles of water a week, and we’re raising a generation that views tap water with disdain and water fountains with suspicion. We’ve come to pay good money–two or three or four times the cost of gasoline–for a product we have always gotten, and can still get, for free, from taps in our homes.

• We buy bottled water because we think it’s healthy. Which it is, of course: Every 12-year-old who buys a bottle of water from a vending machine instead of a 16-ounce Coke is inarguably making a healthier choice. But bottled water isn’t healthier, or safer, than tap water. Indeed, while the United States is the single biggest consumer in the world’s $50 billion bottled-water market, it is the only one of the top four–the others are Brazil, China, and Mexico–that has universally reliable tap water.

• …if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000. Taste, of course, is highly personal. New Yorkers excepted, Americans love to belittle the quality of their tap water. But in blind taste tests, with waters at equal temperatures, presented in identical glasses, ordinary people can rarely distinguish between tap water, springwater, and luxury waters.

• Pepsi has the nation’s number-one-selling bottled water, Aquafina, with 13% of the market. Coke’s Dasani is number two, with 11% of the market. Both are simply purified municipal water–so 24% of the bottled water we buy is tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi for our convenience.

• The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24 hours a day. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity–something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from “one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth,” as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze.

While this is all quite outrageous, one potential response is very simple: carry a reusable bottle and fill it with the local product, for free. Put a label on it that reads “Kensington Spring” or “Eau de Inwood” or Acqua Santa Astoria”… and drink up!

We had a full house for Friday’s lecture by Wilton Duckworth and Joan Ewing of Green Phoenix Permaculture.

Wilton provided some fascinating historical perspective on New York City’s infrastructure; I was particularly intrigued to learn of our transition from a city that was once able to sell its “night soil” (waste from outhouses) to farmers on Long Island for fertilizer, to our current garbage situation requiring massive daily truck caravans to cart our waste to faraway locations, at huge municipal expense. Joan also spoke eloquently of the city’s human resources – energy of youth, wisdom of elders, richness of cultural diversity, etc. – and the need to reclaim our time so we can better utilize them.

photo by Chris Kreussling aka Flatbush Gardener

Harvesting rainwater to mitigate Combined Sewer Overflow and promoting community composting to turn organic waste into nourishment for the city’s gardens and parks were just two of the ideas discussed on what Urban Permaculture might look like; both exemplify perfectly the Permaculture philosophy of turning problems into solutions. It is worth noting that these activities make sense financially as well as environmentally (homeowners, checked your water bill lately?) and are relatively simple to implement.

Sustainable Flatbush would like to give big big thanks to Joan and Wilton for coming back to the neighborhood to share their knowledge and experience with us!!

more photos from Event #3 can be seen at Flatbush Gardener’s Flickr gallery.

Riverkeeper has created a great report on CSO (Combined Sewer Overflow) which illustrates the extent of New York City’s sewer system overflow problem and outlines a number of very simple and affordable solutions. While none of the ideas presented are new to sustainability advocates, what has changed is the level of receptiveness in our city government. As the article states, DEP (Department of Environmental Protection) is still focusing on end-of-pipe solutions, which are more costly and less effective; but PlaNYC has opened dialogue about the potential of source controls – parks, trees, green roofs and rainwater harvesting – to absorb rainfall before it overburdens the sewers. In fact, Riverkeeper’s report proposes treating rainfall as a beneficial resource rather than a problem:

Stormwater Can Make the City More Sustainable.
Source control regards stormwater as a resource to be utilized for much broader sustainability purposes, rather than a waste that must be disposed. By giving life to vegetation, stormwater can help prepare the City for the effects of climate change, decrease summer temperatures, promote energy efficiency, improve air quality, and make communities more livable. A major commitment to source control would help advance a number of ambitious and laudable goals that Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants the City to attain by the year 2030.

Imagine every building’s roof covered with vegetation, every city block lined with trees surrounded by plants and flowers, every apartment house using rainbarrel water for its garden… this is not a pipedream (no pun intended), it can be done for less money than the DEP’s unsustainable and less-effective proposals:

For $1,000 invested in the DEP’s end-of-pipe projects, CSOs might decrease by 2,400 gallons. By comparison, the same $1,000 investment in:

•Greenstreets could decrease CSOs by 14,800 gallons;
•Street trees could decrease CSOs by 13,170 gallons;
•New green roofs could decrease CSOs by 810 gallons; retrofitted green roofs could decrease CSOs by 865 gallons; and incentivized green roofs could decrease CSOs by 12,000 gallons; and
•Rain barrels could decrease CSOs by 9,000 gallons

You get the idea. The whole report is available here. Perhaps the most important force for change will be ordinary citizens educating ourselves about the CSO problem and its potential solutions, and letting our elected officials know what we want, as well as implementing ideas ourselves on the local level. How great would it be to see a rainbarrel in front of every home in Brooklyn?

After the torrential rains of last week, I received an email from an organization called SWIM (StormWater Infrastructure Matters). If you are not yet aware of the major problems New York City faces regarding stormwater runoff, read on.

S.W.I.M.
(Storm Water Infrastructure Matters)

PLaNYC2030: A Great Step Toward a Greener More Sustainable City, but Where’s the SWIMming?

New S.W.I.M.Coalition
Says, “Where’s the SWIMming in the City’s Long-Term Plan?”

Quick. Look out the window. Now. It’s raining, and, guess what? More sewage is being swept into our waterways. Yes, sewage. Again.

Just before Earth Day, as you’ll remember, our city was hit with a nasty and very unusual Spring Northeaster, socking us with torrential rain. And we also watched, just days ago, as a whale lost its bearings and swam into the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. The Daily News named the whale “Sludgie,” and they did that for a reason. Many of our waterways, although generally improved in the last couple of decades, remain polluted. And one of the biggest sources of that pollution: CSOs (Combined Sewer Overflow).

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