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Fort Edward Distribution Center
Going Green
Going Green: Fort Edward Distribution Center
The 150-acre site in Fort Edward, New York is now the processing site for the PCB clean up of the Hudson River. But six years from now planners hope to take advantage of a new rail and water transport system to create a giant food distribution center.
“The site has been developed so that it's probably going to be one of the easiest clean ups ever because it was designed to be cleaned up,” said Preston Gilbert, Director of the SUNY Center for Brownfield Studies.
“The concept we're working from is a European Union concept called a 'freight village,'” said Emanuel Carter, ESF Associate Professor Landscape Architecture. “There are about 60 of them in the European Union. The whole idea is to cut the carbon footprint of cargo transportation and the best way to do that is to make the connection between rail and water transport and what gets phased out is trucking.”
A truck going from Elmira to New York City is lost for two maybe three days between getting down there, waiting to unload, getting caught in traffic and coming back. While transforming the huge buildings built to process PCBs into food storage warehouses, ESF landscape architecture students also proposed a recreation area for boating and water sports.
“This is the recreation area down here that we designed,” said Annalena Davis, ESF graduate student. “There is an existing wetland here, which is also being used to clean storm water. The industrial area is up here for transporting goods and process foods that are grown in upstate New York.” They took into account a nearby bird habitat.
“We added habitat to actually improve that environment so many of the buildings in our design include green roofs with grasses which is what many of the local bird species live in,” said Davis.
Next, it's up to the officials in Fort Edward to decide if this is the plan they want.
