Skiing Your Way to ‘Hedonistic Sustainability’

The new plant will replace a 40-year old incinerator operated by Amagerforbrænding, a waste and energy company. Construction will begin next year. The idea for the ski slope comes from the Bjarke Ingels Group, the Danish architectural firm that took first prize in a design competition for the new plant. Alongside the ski slope, the plant’s smokestack will blow smoke rings each time it fills with 440 pounds of carbon dioxide from flue gas. In a recent interview with National Public Radio, Bjarke Ingels, the founder of the design firm, said the smoke rings would turn “the symbol of pollution into something playful,” while reminding residents of the impact of their consumption.If you’re itching to visit the new advanced waste management plant that will open in 2016 in Copenhagen, be sure to bring your skis. An urban ski park will cover the plant, which will incinerate the waste from five municipalities to generate heat and electricity for 140,000 homes. While their trash is burning inside, locals will be able to take an elevator to the top of the building, then ski down one of three different slopes, graded by difficulty, that jointly run about 5,000 feet.High capital costs, plentiful open space for landfills and groups that advocate recycling rather than incineration have been the major barriers. The recent fiscal problems in Harrisburg, Pa., haven’t helped: the city may be facing bankruptcy because it cannot make the debt payments on its waste-to-energy plant. Nickolas J. Themelis of the Earth Engineering Center at Columbia University, who was featured in Ms. Rosenthal’s Times’ article last April, said that not much had changed here since then. He indicated in an e-mail that only three new facilities have been built in recent years and all were expansions of existing facilities. One new plant has been approved in Frederick County, Md., however.