VIRTUAL Barcelona

Abstract

40% of food produced in the US is wasted, contributing up to 20% of solid waste to landfill in the US each year. While composting technologies have existed for a long time, these methods have struggled to obtain wide scale adoption. Current organic waste recovery technologies exist in two typical forms: aerobic and anaerobic, and these digesters typically handle either small volumes of organic waste for single-family home use, or larger, industrial volumes that require large spaces and centralized waste processing. There are insufficient solutions for digesters that address small-to-medium volume organic waste that are space-efficient on site. Space is a barrier to entry for on-site organics recovery in cities because of large populations and competitive land use. By combining expertise in architecture and microbiology, the outcome of this project is to build an accelerated, multi-stage aerobic digester that converts food waste to compost rapidly, takes up a small footprint, and has the capacity to convert small-to-medium volume of organic waste to compost and can be installed in old phone booths. The areas of application are in urban establishments that do not have space for large anaerobic digesters or land for traditional composting. These include food related industries, commercial and high density residential buildings as well as urban farms. Through the adaptive reuse of phone booths that currently exist throughout cities, using New York City and Singapore as case studies, the project aims to convert old telecommunication spaces into spaces for composting in cities, serving the population living in the cities, as well as regional farmers commuting into the cities.