The Green Apple

Breaking it down: The art of composting

Even though they have no eyes, red wiggler worms are extremely sensitive to light. Two pounds of the worms can process a pound of food scraps a day.

During a presentation on the night of Sept. 21 at the Trespa Design Center in Manhattan, Jenny Blackwell brought in some assistants -- who were a little shy to show their red serpentine bodies to the outside world.

“When I do this for kids they’re super interested in it. When I do this for adults, they’re like ‘What?’” Blackwell told those gathered before passing around a plate of what are known commonly as “red wigglers.”

What Blackwell was doing was talking about starting a worm-bin composting system as one four speakers during GreenHomeNYC’s “Green Building September Forum: Composting and Waste Management.” The event was one of many going on last week in partnership with Climate Week NYC (see previous entry), which concluded this past Monday (Sept. 26).

Through the insight of the three other presenters, the forum was able to discuss bins that can fit on a counter top to expansive municipal compost facilities -- and everything in between. That trio included Christine Ditz-Romero, co-founder and executive director of the Lower East Side Ecology Center; Charlie Bayrer, co-chair of the Brooklyn Queens Land Trust Health Soils Initiative and volunteer with Earth Matter NY; and Stephan’s Koullias, the co-founder and project coordinator of the Western Queens Composting Initiative.

Blackwell, who is the project manager of the NYC Compost Project hosted at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, stood with a plastic storage container by her side. The container was full of a substance known as “vermicompost,” a concoction that makes for a rich, natural fertilizer out of material that once was food scraps and decaying plant remains.

Check it out: Climate Week NYC

 
Mark Kenber, CEO of The Climate Group, addresses the crowd at the opening ceremony of Climate Week NYC at the New York Academy of Sciences at World Trade Center 7 on the morning of Sept. 19. He is flanked by former British prime minister Tony Blair, left, and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. Photo courtesy of The Climate Group.

With autumn knocking on the door -- on Friday, Sept. 23 at 5:04 a.m. to be exact -- and the triple-digit heat wave from this past summer fading from memory, the topic of global warming might not be on the top of most New Yorkers’ minds at the current moment.

Others, though, are taking an active interest by taking part in Climate Week NYC 2011, a series of both private and public events that started Monday (Sept. 21) and will run to Sept. 26 under the leadership of The Climate Group.

Taking part during the same time as the September session of the United Nations General Assembly, the effort started in 2009 by the request of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as a way to prepare for the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, with about 40 events spanning a week. It has blossomed into a showcase for more than 60 unique events. And not all are directly tied to climate change, but rather an overall sustainability initiative to create what The Climate Group CEO Mark Kenber refers to as a “low carbon future.”

“It’s really bringing people together on a whole range of different issues,” Kenber said about the week-long string of events in a recent phone interview with us.

Design for thought

What exactly is the BMW Guggenheim Lab? This 3-plus minute YouTube video will fill in the details.

At approximately 2:30 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, two house-of-cards-like structures composed of pieces of colorful pieces of Styrofoam stood at about two-feet-high inside the BMW Guggenheim Lab at the corner of Houston Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan’s East Village. Two hours later the creations were soaring close to eight feet, with each piece adorned with words and drawings composed from markers.

 “A place to… EXPRESS + EMBRACE a place for all people,” read one. “Electronic Recycling,” proclaimed another.

And as the “visioning wall” continued to climb inside of the 2,200-square-foot lab, so did the spirits of Ann Shostrom. “We just want to get as many ideas as possible,” she said. The wall represented a microcosm of the lab’s mission: to cultivate feedback, ideas and thoughts from the community on sustainability and related matters through an array of more than 100 free programs, most of which are green-oriented. The lab opened on Aug. 3.

The lab is a specially designed mobile structure, which you can visit free of charge Wednesdays through Sundays through Oct 16. Then it moves on, first to Berlin, Germany in the spring of 2012 and later Mumbai, India. And that's just round one: Two more cycles will take the lab to a toal of nine major urban centers around the world in the next six years. All the information, observations and submitted ideas collected as it travels the planet will be displayed in a permanent exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in 2013.

 
Two "visioning walls" consisted of pieces of Styrafoam took shape on the afternoon of Sept. 10 inside the BMW Guggenheim Lab.

On Saturday afternoon, Shostrom was at the lab -- what has been billed as a “combination of think tank, public forum, and community center” -- as part of an event called First Street Green Day. She was there with other members of First Street Green, a grassroots organization who have been trying to beautify a once rat-infested lot. She and the rest of the group could never have imagined all of this.

(Green) music to one's ears

 

 

Below a clear, summer sky that stood in stark contrast to what was brewing hundreds of miles south this past Friday, Dave Matthews -- the namesake of the Dave Matthews Band -- had some surprising pleasantries for Hurricane Irene while standing on a stage on Governors Island.

“We’re going to try to welcome this storm that’s coming,” said Matthews a few songs into the set. The performance was originally scheduled to be the first of three shows during the inaugural run of the Dave Matthews Band Caravan from Aug. 26-28, with sets by other well known bands such as O.A.R, Dispatch and The Roots. Unfortunately, Irene had other plans, forcing the festival to postpone Saturday’s and Sunday’s performances. Matthews promised the crowd that they’d back “so we can finish what we start tonight, hopefully.”

On Thursday night (Sept 1.), festival organizers announced three make-up dates and a new venue: Sept. 16-18 at Randall's Island. All original tickets for the Governors Island event will be honored, but additional tickets will go on sale to the general public at 10:00am on Saturday, Sept. 3., at DMBCaravan/tickets.

In addition to an array of eclectic music, what started on Friday was the spreading of messages from local environmental organizations through semicircles of white tents known as the “Reverb Eco-Village.” The Dave Matthews Band, like many other major musical acts, has been tied to green initiatives for several years. On Friday, festival goers could offset their carbon emissions by buying a $5 token or bring and fill their own resuable water bottles as way to cut down on the disposable variety (see photo after the jump).