High-Level Project Summary
The region we focused on is New York City. There are two incidents of environmental injustice addressed in New York City. These incidents are The North Brooklyn Pipeline and Spatial Disparities in the Distribution of Waste Transfer Stations. We explained the background and facts of the incidents, and along with our solutions. Our solution to the first incident is to introduce a better approach to replace the pipeline. Our solution to the second incident is to add additional actions needed on top of the NYC government's current solution to improve further the problems that NYC faced. These solutions are essential to the future development of NYC and end the environmental injustice in NYC.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
We identified two incidents that took place in South Bronx, North Brooklyn, and Jamaica. Our analysis has shown that these are also environmental justice communities, where most of them are colour of communities and low-income populations. These two incidents are the North Brooklyn Pipeline and Spatial Disparities in the Distribution of Waste Transfer Stations.
For the first incident: North Brooklyn Pipeline, we questioned if pipeline construction was necessary. We eventually concluded that it is not essential and could be replaced by the shared geothermal loops. Geothermal Energy is a good alternative to replace natural gas for heating the buildings. However, opinion surveys among New Yorkers should be conducted, such as the government can readily hear the people’s opinions. The projects may be more organised if their ideas are heard, and the social acceptability of establishing a geothermal system will be high.
In the future, we can conduct field surveys in affected neighbourhoods to better understand the issues. Moreover, we will team up with external organisations and activists to publish a policy mandating geothermal heating systems for new buildings built in New York City. The purposes of the policy are to reduce the usage of natural gas and increase the use of clean energy – Geothermal energy. Furthermore, we will ask the government to subsidise the heating system upgrades from older technologies such as natural gas, oil, and coal to geothermal heating.
For the second incident: Spatial Disparities in the Distribution of Waste Transfer Stations, we identified that the main solution focus should be reducing the burden of environmental justice communities. Even though the Commercial Waste Zones, which is currently planning by the city, could reduce a lot of the burden, such as improving air quality, saving transfer costs, and saving time, it still costs NYC much money to transfer the waste out of the city. On top of this CWZ plan, we decided to add an additional solution to further reduce environmental justice communities’ burden. Hence, we proposed a solution to build waste-to-energy plants in NYC.
Based on a few factors like production, land, natural, and environmental factors, we found that the best place to build waste-to-energy (WTE) plants are Staten Island West Shore IBZ and Southwest Brooklyn IBZ. These two places have far away from the residential area as well as rich in the water supply. Besides, these two places have satisfactory natural factors such as being free of floods. We believe that it not only saves costs but also reduces air pollution, which could greatly help the environmental justice communities.
In the future, we plan to organise field research to the locations we proposed with some professionals to understand the feasibility of our proposition. Besides, we want to conduct interviews with residents near the proposed waste-to-energy facilities and ask for opinions. Lastly, we want to have a meeting with DSNY to evaluate the possibilities, risks, and ROI of building these facilities.
Space Agency Data
Our team had utilised the Space Agency Data from SEDAC and EJSCREEN.
Hackathon Journey
We definitely think that this is an eye-opening challenge for us. We learned a lot about the incidents of environmental injustice in New York City. We decide to choose this challenge is because we thought that it is time to end racism and environmental injustice, so we decide to propose some solutions for this challenge. Our approach to developing this project is to use a lot of geographic maps to understand the situations of different regions. We would like to thank NASA for this opportunity to learn how we can use space agency data to develop our projects.
References
EJSCREEN, SEDAC, various map sources.
Tags
#environmental injustice, #economic discrimination, #racism, #New York City
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.