Letter: Getting the fate of the Green House wrong
Reducing construction waste, and, in this case, discarded parts from temporary exhibitions is both a goal and reality of the aftermath of each show at the School of Architecture Gallery.
Unfortunately, Thomas Chase, in preparation for his guest column (“Throwing away the Green House and sustainability,” Oct. 27) did not take the time to contact me, my colleagues or other students at the School of Architecture to check his facts. While parts of the National Building Museum’s “Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture” did make their way into a dumpster behind Paul Rudolph...
#2
By Thomas Chase
3:49p.m. on November 2, 2009
*typo* - "...burned and released as carbon dioxide..."
I appreciate Professor Sakamoto's response to my column on the fate of the Green House exhibit.
It was my mistake that a new dumpster was ordered for the exhibit's materials. As a student employee, I often remove waste to the school's dumpster, and saw a new, additional dumpster for the first time when it was holding the exhibit's materials. I was unaware that the dumpster had been ordered for routine trash.
Aside from this minor detail, a great deal of material from the exhibit was sent to a landfill, after only a two year life span. As two years is far less time than it took nature to produce those materials, this is an unsustainable approach to display practices. Additionally, the biodegradable materials used in the exhibit will never have the chance to biodegrade if sent to a landfill - landfill's are inhospitable to the environmental processes of biodegradation. If the materials are able to biodegrade, they will turn into methane, a potent greenhouse gas, which may or may not be burned as carbon dioxide, the most prevalent greenhouse gas. Incineration, the end-of-life for much waste in CT, would rapidly turn those materials into carbon dioxide.
Wood recycling facilities do, in fact, exist in the New Haven area, and one of the best is 10 minutes away from Yale.
I recognize the attempts made by the school and the gallery to promote sustainable building, but also the long ways waste management in building practices and in the way the school is operated have to go. I look forward to working towards a better, more environmentally responsible approach to waste management at Yale and beyond.