This just sucks - apparently the current solution for moldy debris from New Orleans is to put it in a big un-lined landfill, in the middle of a Vietnamese-American neighborhood and the largest urban wildlife refuge in the country. From the
NY Times:
Block after block, neighborhood after neighborhood, tens of thousands of hurricane-ravaged houses here rot in the sun, still waiting to be gutted or bulldozed. Now officials have decided where several million tons of their remains will be dumped: in man-made pits at the swampy eastern edge of town, out by the coffee-roasting plant and the space-shuttle factory and the big wildlife refuge.
But more than a thousand Vietnamese-American families live less than two miles from the edge of the new landfill. And they are far from pleased at having the moldering remains of a national disaster plunked down nearby, alongside the canal that flooded their neighborhood when Hurricane Katrina surged through last year.
Please read the story in the
Times. Obviously there's a lot of trash in New Orleans right now, and there will be whole hell of a lot more, as more houses are gutted and cleaned up. The trash has to go somewhere, and I don't want to get bogged down in excessive NIMBYism, but this isn't the best solution.
I went to undergrad at Tulane, majoring in environmental studies, and even pre-Katrina, things were never top of the line environmentally in the Big Easy, to say the least. The term "Environmental Racism" was practically invented for Louisiana, with such fiascos as the proposed Shintech factory in Convent, LA, the Agriculture Street Landfill in New Orleans, and the entire stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known as Cancer Alley, for obvious reasons.
While we did separate toxics from trash when I was gutting houses with Acorn two weeks ago, this isn't always happening:
In the rush to rebuild, this hurricane-smashed city is dumping its debris into the swamps by the truckload -- and throwing away an opportunity to turn America's costliest natural disaster into the nation's greatest recycling effort, environmentalists say.
Every day, trucks rumble down the streets on their way to the Old Gentilly Landfill, a municipal dump in the swampiest part of the city, to unload the debris that homeowners and contractors have piled up on the curbs throughout New Orleans.
With large-scale home demolitions now beginning, there are no comprehensive, citywide plans to salvage and recycle building materials -- things such as cypress and cedar boards, bricks, cinderblocks and roof tiles.
"We don't have the time," said John Rogers, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality's recycling specialist. He cited the sheer volume of debris created by Katrina -- 30 years' worth of the stuff, officials say.
And what's more, on the whole, New Orleans has failed to see the potential environmentally-friendly post-Katrina rebuilding
opportunities:
"We've been given this great opportunity to build New Orleans back right," said architect Dan Weiner, a board member of the Green Project, a building supply recycling center. "Never has a community had so many homes to rebuild at once."
As Green Project employees point out, the pine and cypress wood taken from 19th- and early 20th-century houses is denser and of larger dimensions than present-day lumber. For instance, unlike today's 2-by-4s, which are actually 1¾-by-3½, antique 2-by-4s are really 2-by-4 or more. And at 45 cents per foot, the Green Project's old-growth 2-bys aren't a bad buy (new lumber runs about 35 cents a foot untreated, or 55 cents if it's pressure treated).
Those antique architectural scraps are often irreplaceable. In addition to recycling, the role of the Green Project in the rebuilding of a historic city such as New Orleans is preservation.
"We give the opportunity to reuse lumber and millwork in an economical, utilitarian way," said Reynolds. "But far more important is keeping our heritage . . . What used to be roof decking in the Treme is now the ceiling of an office in Bywater."