Sustainability to stay alive

The city’s huge Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant has been upgraded with eight large digester ‘eggs’ which allow it to turn contaminated water and rotten organic material such as food waste into bio-gas, which is being used as an alternative heating fuel.

By cutting out the city’s dependence on ‘dirty’ central heating fuels such as diesel New York has seen its air quality improve dramatically, with a corresponding sharp drop in hospital admissions from respiratory illness.

And the high-tech waste treatment plant has now gone a step further by generating electricity from captured methane and CO₂ emissions.

By 2017 the plant will be cutting New York City’s emissions by 90,000 tons a year – the equivalent of taking 19,000 cars from the road.

The plant may also become a useful source of hydrogen gas, which US carmakers believe will become the clean vehicle fuel of the future, thanks to new developments in fuel cell technology (see our story Fuel cell cars taking over).