Peer through a peep hole at any one of the 8,243 currently active construction sites in New York City, and you may find a muddy mess of exposed New York soil, churned by excavators and waiting to be hauled off by beeping dump trucks in the wee hours. Thousands of tons of spoil — everything from loamy native soil to slurried schist turned up by tunnel bores — must be harvested and removed before construction can begin. What becomes of this very urban yield? In a wasteful cycle, most excavated soil leaves New York City limits in fossil-fueled dump trucks to be processed in New Jersey or further afield, only to end up back at other construction sites within the five boroughs.
Perhaps New York might take cues from cities like Paris, Vienna, Shanghai, and Tokyo, which are reorienting their urban metabolisms to minimize both material and carbon waste. Revaluing spoil could make New York’s never-ending redevelopment an engine of local and circular economy — could it also help the city meet urgent demands for waterfront fortification in the era of climate change? In the first of a two-part series, the architectural historian and architect Lynnette Widder considers the oft overlooked urban resource that is New York’s displaced substrata.
The largest construction projects underway in New York City are mammoth in scope. Consider the 1.2 million square-foot project to replace Terminal 6 at Kennedy Airport, or the grandiose Second Avenue Subway extension, its completed first phase some 64 feet wide, 100 feet deep and 1,600 feet long, with more than twice that still to come. An official interactive map of “active major construction” includes several projects spanning more than 2 million square feet. Each of these building and infrastructural projects sets in motion unimaginable quantities of material even before construction starts: “Construction and demolition” (C&D) refuse, which can include remains of a demolished structure but also pavement, broken rock, fractured obsolete infrastructure and just about anything found below ground level. That material raised from the earth, including both untouched and anthropogenic soils, is a more narrowly defined category of what an excavation company might call “spoil.”
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