Waste Management Through Urban Farms
in Chicago, Illinois
Authors： Tania Cao & Damon Tang
Chicago has many strengths and weaknesses. It has a strong culture with trendy beliefs yet fails to tackle some critical elements directly related to its habitat [1]. While working in Chicago for a few months, I noticed a stark difference in how trash is disposed of. Most buildings do not have recycling bins and instead, opt for a single general trash bin. However, I also noticed that locals and businesses like to build a purpose for their actions by believing in bettering themselves and the environment. As a result, we developed a proposal to improve the management of food waste through the local production of food in urban farms.
City of Food Deserts
A food desert is an urban area with minimal access to healthy, nutritious food. In our project, area coverage is dependent on the type and size of food source. The food sources we work with here are grocery stores, produce carts, farmer's markets, and urban farms. In recent years, the city has been making efforts to improve the city's food desert problem by encouraging the building of supermarkets and farmers' markets. This effort has shown improvements but has reached a limit as the increase in markets doesn't help people of low income [2]. That being the case, we chose to focus on urban farms, which allow residents to actively interact with the community while providing a space to grow instead of buy food. To do so, we combine demographic and spatial data to form the basis of our GIS analysis.
Change in food deserts in Chicago from 2007 to 2014 [3]
Questions To Ponder On
Where are food deserts located?
Where can we add urban farms?
How will the farms affect the distribution of food deserts?
Step 1
Set the background
Population
Food Insecurity
Step 2
Map out current food desserts
Food Sources
Food Source Buffers
Food Desert 1
Step 3
Map out future food desserts
Urban Farms
Urban Farm Buffers
Food Dess
Step 4
Map out the effects of our proposal
Summary
Urban Farm Proposal
Chicago Has A Major Waste Problem
Looking into the city’s study on waste characterization and diversification, we learn that the city has an ongoing RRR (Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle) program called The Blue Cart, which aims to improve waste management. This program, however, does not provide enough coverage for the whole city. It will also take a considerable amount of time or authoritative power to implement and see its effects. That being the case, urban farms pose an alternate and indirect solution that will help decrease landfill waste.
Marketing of urban farms has multiple advantages. It strengthens the notion of community living and is environment-friendly. Most importantly, though, it follows the Chicagoan sentiment of storytelling. The more traction the farms get, the bigger the change.
The value of locally-grown foods is generally higher than imported goods. This is directly correlated to a decrease in organic waste. The direct harvesting from the farms also decreases the amount of waste produced from the processing of such. To get a better gist of how this works, here we have Sankey diagrams that show the distribution of waste in Chicago.
The first diagram shows the present distribution. The second diagram looks at the distribution of waste after the implementation of the proposed urban farms.
Our proposal involves the development of 667 urban farms, which span a total of 2,836,684 square feet of land. In that space, we can produce approximately 329 tons of produce.
Based on studies by the United Nations, a third of the food produced is thrown away. Other sources also note approximations of waste generated through packaging. After calculations, the following waste is generated:
109 tons of organic waste
25.08 tons of paper waste
88 tons of plastic waste
Since this is the amount of waste typically generated from our urban farms, this is the amount we save from ending up in landfills. As pictured in the diagrams, the change is relatively small but positively significant. It proves that urban farms can tackle multiple issues at once.
After all, more local food means less waste generated through packaging used in traditional markets and better inclusiveness in the interest of the local Chicagoans.