The future is impossible to know, what with all of our promised flying cars and jetpacks not even close to being made. Nor do they seem like a good idea. That doesn’t mean we still can’t turn to fanciful sci-fi ideas to solve our problems, like the proposal from architecture firm PRESENT that New York solve its garbage problem by making giant floating compost island piers with parks on top of them. As if we’re suddenly better than the old fashioned way of just sending it to be buried in Pennsylvania.
According to PRESENT, instead of sending our garbage to landfills on trucks carbon-spewing trucks, New York should build a number of floating, street-level compost sites similar to piers along the waterfront, known as the Green Loop, with each borough sharing some of the burden. Although it wouldn’t be a huge burden, since instead of providing a bunch of smelly garbage pits, the compost factories would be covered with public parkland, so we’d have floating public parks to go along with our floating public pool. Well, that and a whole lotta compost.
Is this the craziest solution to a problem we’ve heard about in New York? Well, no not really, because we all just lived through a political season that featured John Catsimatidis and Jimmy McMillan run for mayor. Plus, the idea of giant piers of compost, actually sounds pretty awesome and futuristic. And we could always just sell the compost to other garbage-poor cities.