A Vacation Destination Garbage Facility
Leave it to the creative Danes to come up with a waste treatment plant that doubles as a recreational attraction
By Manny Frishberg
Imagine flying to Scandinavia to ski on a high-tech garbage plant. That is precisely the vision behind revolutionary architect Bjarke Ingels’ firm’s Amager Bakke waste-to-energy (WTE) facility, being built in the middle of the Danish capital, Copenhagen.
In a bravura example of making a virtue of necessity, BIG (the Bjarke Ingels Group) is creating not only one of the cleanest WTE plants in the world, but the tallest structure in Copenhagen. As if that weren’t enough, the plant would also give the notoriously flat Danish countryside its first ski slope, built on the facility’s roof.
Over the last two decades. Europe has completely rethought how they handle their garbage. In Denmark, only about 3 percent of the country’s trash now goes to landfills. Well over half the refuse is recycled, while another 39 percent is burned in WTE plants that use the heat to provide space heating and electricity. The new plant, which will replace Copenhagen’s current WTE plant in 2017, will provide heat for 160,000 households and electricity for 62,500 homes.
Modern waste-to-energy facilities are a far cry from the garbage incinerators of the bad old days, when toxic fumes went up the chimney with most of the heat. These days, the plants heat water for local buildings and make steam to drive turbines. Harmful chemicals are collected and used for feedstocks to make fertilizers and synthetic diesel fuel.
In 2010, Europe had 451 WTE facilities, turning73 million metric tons of waste into 44 million megawatt-hours of electricity — enough to keep the lights on for 13 million people.
Amager Bakke will be green, but not perfectly clean. To draw attention to the CO2 it does release, the plant will send it up in highly visible smoke rings.
"CO2 rings" appear in this artist's rendering of the Amager Bakke plant. Image courtesy of BIG Architects.