Waste in new age skyscrapers

Recently I read an interesting article relating to a new residential 47 storey skyscraper that was being developed in Benidorm, Spain. Basically, the design team of the building forgot to fit an adequate elevator shaft preventing the adequate servicing of all the upper floors and in effect making this space useless. The oversight wasn’t spotted until the building was already 110 meters tall.

A few days later a newspaper extract on the six tallest skyscrapers under construction landed on my desk, and this made me pose the question “how can waste be efficiently and sustainably managed in the world’s highest buildings?”

These news articles demonstrated a fundamental requirement of buildings, as well as providing floor space, it must be connected to service its proposed needs, vertically in this case. Despite being a fundamental aspect for the functionality of any development, waste removal requirements are prone to being underestimated during the design process and not enough attention is paid to the way a development would deal with it in future.

The physical collection of waste in high rise buildings continues to pose many challenges; the traditional approach is commonly based on setting up vertical refuse chutes to collect waste, and loading docks in the parking areas. Although in general terms this is a convenient method for residents, waste chutes don’t keep up with current trends and strategies for example source segregation of waste. Skyscrapers usually have limited space for containers in the loading dock, making recycling activities even more challenging.

As population increases and technology develops, skyscrapers seem to be conquering the city landscape, and reaching heights beyond expectation. One of the tallest skyscrapers currently under construction the Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia, is set to become the first building in the world to reach a staggering height of 1 kilometre. A building that tall would roughly generate 12 tonnes per week, the equivalent to about 600 homes. In a building that tall a considerable amount of waste will be generated within a relatively small surface area, representing a huge impact for ground level waste management systems and those ground level collection points. With urbanisation increasing and space in cities becoming tighter, this scenario is likely to become more frequent in the future.

In order to develop more efficient and sustainable approaches to dealing with waste in the new generation of skyscrapers, not only do we have to rely on technology, but on a shift in behaviour. We have to stop focusing on dealing with waste and look at understanding how waste would be generated in developments like the Kingdom Tower, putting more effort into preventing waste from being generated. This change of behaviour is needed if we are to move from a throwaway society, to one in which waste is predominantly reduced, and the remaining is seen as a valuable resource.

In that regard, the waste industry offers an additional advantage as it is a fast growing sector. Waste to energy technologies such as gasification and anaerobic digestion have the benefit of being scalable. A gasifier can decompose solid waste in order to produce syngas, which may be used to generate electricity and heat for the building. Similarly, anaerobic digestion makes use of organic waste to generate methane, which can also be used to generate power in a variety of ways. These localised technologies have the potential to be implemented in this new generation of vertical cities and could provide renewable energy.

At Buro Happold we understand that waste systems in skyscraper cities are critical infrastructure and therefore it is always key to think beyond waste. We have adopted a holistic approach which gives high relevance to all the aspects that lead to the generation of waste without underestimating other factors that form part of the development.