Ecological Urbanism Final Project
Yale Graduate Elective
INSTRUCTOR Alexander Felson
SITE Yale University West Campus, West Haven, CT
PROGRAM composting, constructed wetland
TEAM Chris Kieran (School of Forestry), Keith Lee (School of Forestry)
West Campus’s business park roots from leave it with an abundance of parking spaces, intensive landscaping, and oversized loading docks. Under Yale University’s ownership and increasing population there is a growing amount of horticultural waste from landscape maintenance, paper waste from office buildings, and vegetable waste from conference events and the cafeteria. To address this demand, our proposal is to reconfigure the flows internally and use existing parking lot medians as sheet composting sites and constructed wetlands. The system is a mix of waste management and water quality management through a designed experiment. With a potential for 21 cells utilizing existing gradation we plan to test the impact of composting mix on water quality and balance this by treating the nutrient rich water. The entire system will function to process the waste streams of West Campus on-site with little environmental impact while producing compost for use on-site or sale. It will also serve as an adaptive management tool that will help manage waste streams on West Campus.
