From eyesore to eye on the future
Cathédrale verte would recycle Des Carrières incinerator into a waste-disposal facility that creates biofuel and bioplastics
The twin chimneys of the Des Carrières incinerator poke the sky above Rosemont–La-Petite-Patrie, a cityscape landmark that looms over the surrounding neighbourhood’s duplexes and triplexes.
Opened in 1931 and formerly known as Incinerator No. 3, the garbage-disposal facility has stood mostly vacant at Des Carrières St. and Christophe-Colomb Ave. since 1993.
There was a time when it burned 300 tonnes of trash a day. By the early 1990s, the toxic pollutants those chimneys coughed up were deemed too dangerous and the building was abandoned.
Nicolas Vézeau and Jean-Baptiste Reulet want to recycle the Des Carrières incinerator into a new kind of waste-disposal facility — a high-tech one that creates biofuel and bioplastics out of people’s discarded banana peels and chicken bones. They’ve named it the Cathédrale verte.
“Right now our model is broken. We ship our waste 100 kilometres out of the city. That has a very heavy toll on roads, infrastructures. It’s really cost inefficient,” Vézeau says.
He says up to 95 per cent of Montrealers’ garbage is composed of carbon, which can be safely transformed into something resembling petroleum — the main ingredient in plastic.
He wants to make bioplastic pellets out of garbage, which would then be transformed via 3D printer into things like prosthetics that could serve local hospitals.
The biofuel, Vézeau says, could be used to power the city’s fleet of vehicles.
That’s the element he’s using to sell his idea to the city. The Cathé- drale verte founders want a 34year lease on the incinerator and a public-private partnership with the city.
Vézeau says it’s a win-win situation. Montreal would stop shipping some of its garbage to out-of-town landfills, would get biofuel out of the deal and save what Vézeau estimates as $25 million a year.
Vézeau envisages ivy cascading down the chimneys, and trees and other vegetation in place of the ample concrete the incinerator has. The local eco-centre could expand its activities, and perhaps some of the property could serve as a green space for residents.
Vézeau and Reulet have been working on the idea for a couple of years now, but they pitched it at Je vois Montréal in November to gain some traction with the city.
It’s one of 181 community-improvement projects that were selected to continue on in the second portion of the Je vois Montréal exercise, known as Je fais Montréal.
As part of its Montreal Reimagined series, the Montreal Gazette has profiled at least a dozen citizens who are doing their part to make the city a better place to live.
Here are five other projects that seek to improve Montrealers’ quality of life: Bridging the digital divide Stéphane Guidion of Open North, a collective of socially minded programmers and technologists, pitched the tentatively titled Tornade Numérique after observing the way the city handled last year’s Défi Info-Neige.
Guidion’s idea is to create a notfor-profit organization that could help the city and community organizations by taking on their technology-oriented projects without exposing them to the risk of potential failure.
Rather than the city trying to identify people’s needs and then starting from the ground up each time it wants to tackle a problem using an online tool or application, Tornade Numérique would be involved from the start, providing a continuous link between communities and the city.
Homelessness, Internet access, transportation and health are just some of the issues Guidion envisions tackling.
Guidion says similar projects in U.S. cities like Chicago and Philadelphia have proven successful: “The dispatch of resources was more coherent with the real needs of the community.” More affordable city housing Louise Hodder, president and founder of Vivacité Montréal, wants to give Montrealers a better shot at finding affordable housing in the city by offering to front homebuyers the cash for a down payment.
Hodder describes it as shared equity, or a community land trust.
A simpler way would be to look at it as though Vivacité Montréal is buying a stake in your home by fronting you 20 per cent, so that when you sell your home, it goes to the next person in line. You’d get your mortgage and 25 per cent of market appreciation back, and it keeps the cost low for the next buyer.
“I believe we can make Montreal a great place for families — but let’s do it now because if we don’t, the values of the properties will grow and then families really won’t be able to afford this place,” Hodder says. Making tunnels less creepy If you want to get to the Canadian Centre for Architecture by public transit, the quickest route is to get off at Georges-Vanier métro and walk through a dark, scary tunnel.
And that’s just one of several such tunnels in Montreal’s Sud-Ouest borough.
“The Southwest is probably the neighbourhood right now that’s growing the most, and in terms of urban planning, there hasn’t been a tremendous amount of foresight,” architect Nicolas Demers Stoddart says.
He wants to create a bollard — a seven-foot fancy lamppost — that would project light and music onto tunnel walls to make them less creepy and more of a fun attraction. Demers Stoddart says tunnels could be named after Oscar Peterson, Oliver Jones and Maurice Richard, with the sounds reflecting their namesakes.
“There’s no way we’re going to un-tunnel it,” Demers Stoddart says. “We simply want to frame in a safer and (more fun) way.” Share your stuff You bought an electric drill to hang some shelves five years ago and now it’s sitting in your closet, collecting dust.
Sound familiar? It did to Gabriel Saba. He created SharingKit, an online lending platform to allow people to share or rent out their power tools, sports equipment, camping gear, barbecues — pretty much everything that isn’t nailed down. The goal is to reduce consumption by pooling resources.
Saba says Montreal is the perfect place to have this kind of platform because people are already fairly community oriented and environmentally minded.
Do your jumping jacks in the alleyway
There are about 200 green alleyways in Montreal, and they’re pretty great, says Simon Octeau of the Regroupment des éco-quartiers.
But it would be even better if some of them were connected to create stretches several kilometres long that could serve as biking and running paths, nice spots to go for an evening stroll and a place to socialize with neighbours.
“It’s an area that’s underused, but it takes up a lot of space in central neighbourhoods. They could be serving a larger purpose than what they already do,” Octeau says.
His organization is working on pilot projects in Ville-Marie, Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, Rosemont– La-Petite-Patrie and Ville-Émard.