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elegance in design & engineering meets recycling

Ten years in the making, a public-private partnership between the New York City Economic Development Corporation and Sims Municipal Recycling, a division of Sims Metal Management, designed and master-planned by Selldorf Architects, New York City’s 11-acre South Brooklyn Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility performs.

Opened in December of 2013, the 140,000-square-foot facility is the principal processing facility for all of New York City’s residential metal, glass, and plastic recyclables. The facility has the capacity to process 1,000 tons of recyclable material every day.

Selldorf Architects (architect to museums and galleries worldwide, including the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego) organized the buildings to create the site’s own urban context and designed the facility to optimize environmental performance.

The buildings are made from 99% recycled American-made steel. The buildings, wharf, recycling equipment, and electrical substations are elevated four feet – using a blend of recycled glass and crushed stone from Second Avenue subway tunneling operations – to prevent damage from sea level rise and storm surges. New York City’s first commercial-scale (100 kW) wind turbine and the City’s largest solar installation (600 kW) generate energy on site. On-site storm water management is included as are two acres of native plantings.

Access by barge will help eliminate 150,000 annual truck trips (240,000 truck miles). Newly-renovated freight rail will be used for the export of processed recyclables.

See:

“Sustainability and Design Tour of Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility” | AtlasObsura, May 2017

“Selldorf Architects’ Sunset Park recycling facility in Brooklyn sets a new standard in sustainable design” | Pei-Ruh Keh, Wallpaper, 13 December 2013

“Mayor Bloomberg, Deputy Mayor Holloway and Sanitation Commissioner Doherty Announce Opening of New State-of-the-Art Recycling Facility – Able to Process Metal, Glass and All Plastics in One Location” | Office of the Mayor, City of New York, 12 December 2013

“Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility” | Selldorf Architects

Sims Municipal Recycling

Sims Recyling Solutions

Sims Metal Management

#sunsetparkmaterialrecoveryfacility #Brooklyn #NewYork #NewYorkCity #SimsMetalManagement #SimsMunicipalRecycling #SelldorfArchitects #NYCEconomicDevelopmentCorporstion #recycling #architecture #design #art #museums #galleries #luxury #smartluxury #urbanluxury #resilience #energy #solar #solarenergy #windenergy #engineering #construction #buildingtech #tech #sealevelrise #stormsurge #CO2 #H2O #realestate #commercialrealestate #CRE #finance #ROI

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valuing climate-related risks, investing well, & avoiding stranded assets

The Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD, @FSB_TCFD) has published a new report on June 29. The report is published as part of a G20 initiative led by the governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney and the former mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg.

The report provides a framework for companies to disclose in their financial filings all of their direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions and describe the risks and opportunities caused by climate change under a range of potential scenarios. The objective of such disclosures would be to allow economies to properly value climate-related risks and to help minimize the risk, to investors, banks, and insurers, that market adjustments to climate change will be incomplete, late and potentially destabilizing.

Importantly, the report recommends that banks should disclose lending to companies with carbon-related risks.

Climate change presents global markets with risks and opportunities that cannot be ignored. The framework can be of assistance to investors (such as banks, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, university endowments, investors in commercial real estate, and homeowners) as they evaluate the potential risks and rewards of a transition to a lower carbon economy and avoid investing in assets that might become stranded, non-performing (such as non-performing loans made to entities that are cash-strapped due to rising carbon costs or houses and buildings that themselves cannot perform and/or are difficult or impossible to sell).

While the report’s recommendations are intended to be adopted by all companies, extra guidance is given to the financial sector. Other sectors, likely to be most affected by climate change and/or the transition to a lower carbon economy, are also given extra guidance. The other sectors likely to be most affected by climate change and/or the transition to a lower carbon economy include energy, transportation, construction, and agriculture, food, and forestry.

Christian Thimann, Group Head of Regulation, Sustainability and Insurance Foresight, AXA Group and a member of the TCFD, observes that insurers “see the frequency and intensity of natural disasters linked to climate change augmenting every year.” “Insurers,” Dr. Thimann says,
consider a world of plus two degrees may still be insurable but a world of plus four degrees might not be.”

Dr. Thimann notes that while banks have a shorter outlook than insurers

  • Banks “too can use these recommendations because they will need to steer their lending between sectors aligned with a 2-degree world and sectors not aligned. They need to know which are the sectors with a high risk of stranded assets in the future and those with a low risk of stranded assets in the future.”

 

See:

“Banks should disclose lending to companies with carbon-related risks” | Michael Slezak, The Guardian, 29 June 2017

#TCFD #MarkCarney #BankofEngland #NYC #MichaelBloomberg #climatechange #climaterisk #strandedassets #banks #investors #finance #insurance #AXA #lowcarboneconomy #energy #transportation #construction #agriculture #food #forestry#realestate #homeownership #museums #artcollections #art