Manifesto - Urban Decay to Infinite Recycling

MANIFESTO- URBAN DECAY TO INFINITE RECYCLING We live in a world that is in a continuous decay where the scarcity of non-renewable resources has become a serious problem and will become more severe in the near future, due to abusive extraction and the lack of finding new resources besides the non-renewable ones. The growth of population has led to an increase of consumption and waste amounts and the decrease of fossil resources. This problem needs to be urgently solved otherwise we will leave a very uncertain world for the future generations. This made us want to create a manifesto. The manifesto is expressed as the concept for a new type of recycling skyscraper, that uses waste as a resource. The process inspired is from the cave sponge’s way of recycling nutrients, turning over energy that nobody else can use into energy that everyone can use. Similarly to the cave sponge, the ‘recycling installation’ would transform waste into valuable resources for the community. This cycle will turn an issue of cities around the world into an advantage, using a cradle to cradle concept for obtaining raw-materials valuable technical nutrients. The project consists of a case study for the City of Mumbai, for solving the problem of high costs of waste management, unsanitary landfills and the problem of the people who live in unhealthy conditions near these landfills. The costs of waste management will decrease due to the use of robots and the location of the buildings within the city. The issue of the polluting landfills will be solved due to usage of the wastes existing there to produce new resources in the recycling buildings. The technological circuit is designed like a cycle consisting of a complex system of conveyors that transport the waste at several processing levels specialized on waste types: plastic, paper, glass, metal, debris, electronic waste. One vertical side of the building is designed for storing, sorting and cleaning the waste; the other is for processing, obtaining the raw materials and technical nutrients. The horizontal volume consists of a biogas plant that processes the organic waste. The building has a set of wind turbines and solar panels that combined with the energy from the biogas plant make it self-sustainable. Once the building has proved its efficiency in solving the problems of Mumbai – unsanitary landfills, high cost of waste management, health hazards – it will become the pioneer of the cycle of transforming the “urban decay” into infinite recycling.