By Raanan Geberer
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN – Nowadays, it seems that everyone’s talking about sustainability, reducing carbon emissions, energy conservation, green roofs and the like.

However, much of Downtown Brooklyn is already engaged in “green� practices, although these are often in industrial applications that are not usually seen by the general public.

Thursday, about 200 students, professors and community residents took part in New York City College of Technology’s “Brooklyn GreenWalk� through Downtown, Vinegar Hill, DUMBO and Cadman Plaza. The students represented all fields of study, from nursing to hospitality to chemistry to physics to English.

The tour was led by Professors Mark Noonan and Robin Michals. In an innovative fashion, many students themselves gave talks about the various sites and their environmental significance.

The first site visited was somewhat unique on the tour because it represents inefficiency and not-so-clean technology, at least according to student Kurt Sealey, who spoke in front of it. The site is Con Edison’s Hudson Avenue Cogeneration Plant, built in the 1950s because of increasing demand for steam to heat Manhattan office buildings.

Actually, cogeneration, or the simultaneous production of electricity and steam, is a fairly old idea, going back 100 years or so, but it has had a renewal in popularity since the 1980s.

The problem with the Hudson Avenue plant, said Sealey, is that it was built to burn oil rather than cleaner natural gas, favored in more recent power plants. A new power plant, he said, will produce 20 tons of NO2 (nitrogen dioxide), a significant air pollutant. “This plant,� said Sealey, “produces 820 tons of nitrogen dioxide.�

The second stop was the Chambers recycled paper plant on John and Adams streets. The plant performs a valuable service by recycling old newspapers. Of the pulp produced, 80 percent is shipped to foreign countries, notably China, while the rest is used here. Claudia Preciad, the student who spoke here, said that one ton of recycled paper saves about 4,000 kilowatts of electricity.

The next stop was the new “beach� at Brooklyn Bridge Park, where engineering student Wing Wong talked about the beauty of nature and the Hudson during the 19th century and how it inspired Walt Whitman. Then, we moved on to Galapagos, a music club/theater originally in Williamsburg whose new DUMBO location, originally a stable, is being rebuilt.

The new Galapagos will soon be granted LEED certification, meaning that it meets rigorous standards of sustainability and energy conservation. Some 65 percent of the energy purchased by Galapagos will be generated by hydropower, wind power and other renewable energy sources. Of course, it will also use new technology like compact fluorescent light bulbs.

The next stop, and the most interesting to many, was the DUMBO restaurant Rice. Owner David Selig told the crowd how his restaurant uses no chemicals for cleaning or maintenance, and relies on Borax rather than poisons to deter vermin. He also recycles vegetable frying oil to run his van, cutting down on diesel emissions and providing himself with free fuel.

He showed the group both the colorful van and the pumping mechanism for the veggie oil, and volunteered the information that his doing this process on his own may violate some regulations.

“I actually welcome getting caught,� he said, “so that then I’ll have more of an opportunity to tell people what I’m doing. I’m an outlaw at heart.�

The excess cooking oil consumed by Rice, he added, is sold to Tri State Biofuel. Rice also trucks its vegetable waste – leftover fruits and vegetables and the like – as compost to Red Hook Farms. In return, Red Hook Farms sells its herbs to Rice.

The stop after that was Cadman Plaza Park, where 713 London plane trees take harmful carbon dioxide out of the air and convert it to oxygen by a process known as photosynthesis, which some of you may have learned back in high school. Since so many cars drive through the area, emitting carbon dioxide, the trees do a valuable service.

However, they weren’t planted for environmentalist reasons – in the 1950s, when they were put there, environmentalism and energy conservation were very low on society’s totem pole, Rather, they were planted as a memorial to Rev. Samuel Parkes Cadman, popular Congregationalist minister and radio preacher for whom the park was named.

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