Green Goals

In its quest to host the 2004 Olympic games, Hammarby Sjostad, a neighborhood in Stockholm, Sweden converted the community into a green paradise. Though it was unsuccessful in securing the coveted games, the neighborhood gained great notoriety in its forward thinking use of trash. Everything gets sorted and sucked into pneumatic tubes-- food for compost, paper for recycling, and garbage for incineration, which is then used for energy. Even sewage comes back, serving as both fertilizer and biogas.

Clearly most cities are having trouble right now making payroll, never mind retrofitting the entire landscape with pneumatic tubes; however it did make me wonder about a place like Disney World. As I walked around the park, I saw many missed opportunities for Disney to set a more eco-friendly example. Plastic bags were used for even the most insignificant purchase, few recycling stations existed, no signs of photovoltaic panels, while energy was consumed in vast quantities. I shudder to think of the park's carbon footprint. One idea that I think could be truly inventive would be to put in piezoelectric flooring, panels which generate kinetic energy with foot traffic. Imagine if every person of the 44,000 who passed through the Magic Kingdom's turnstiles actually generated a percentage of energy. That might just put some meaning into the name: Tomorrowland.