The Denver Zoo’s waste-to-energy plant really does seem almost as nifty and forward-thinking as zoo officials claim — which is no small distinction given the daily drumbeat of hype we endure on matters large and small.
The facility will use a high-temperature gasification process — don’t say incineration; they’ll correct you — to transform hundreds of tons of zoo waste, including plenty of animal excrement, into a combustible gas that will reduce the zoo’s energy needs by 20 percent.
No wonder a unanimous City Council gave its initial green light Monday to firing up the facility, which is already built, over the coming year.
Who would vote against the zoo’s “zero-waste” future, scheduled for arrival by 2025?
But last-minute lobbying by nearby residents did give some council members pause, as it should have, on at least one issue. To put it politely, the zoo’s south side at the site of the energy plant is an aesthetic failure. Or, to borrow the blunt language of a City Park West resident, the industrial facility “sits as a wart on the landscape, a permanent defacement of City Park, planted in the very midst of its most historic and heavily used areas.”
Strong words, but not too far beyond the truth. And the zoo buildings to the west of the facility are no sight for sore eyes, either.
Adding to the irritation of nearby residents, as a number of them pointed out in a letter to council members, is that “the zoo took care to shield their visitors from this industrial section of their facility, inflicting it instead on people using City Park.”
Some residents also are raising questions about possible noise and stench from the waste-to-energy process, but it is a bit late for that debate. Zoo officials told the council — as they told me several days earlier — that they received essentially no complaints about the project or siting until the past few weeks, despite multiple public presentations and news stories over several years.
Still, it was striking to see how incurious council members were about such matters. You’d have thought zoo officials would have been fielding questions Monday about decibels, odors and the nature of emissions, for example, but that was not the case.
A “green” industrial project seems to inoculate the developer from such inquiry.
For the record, the need for an air permit was triggered by expected carbon monoxide emissions, according to Jennifer Hale, the zoo’s director of safety and sustainability. Those emissions should be well below limits allowed by the “minor source” permit, she told me, and plastics will be sorted out to reduce the possibility of toxic releases.
Still, there remains the issue of the zoo’s unappealing face to the park. In the zoo’s defense, it didn’t choose the site just because its patrons wouldn’t see it. That’s where the zoo has handled waste for decades— much of it then trucked away. And the zoo has spent about $700,000 in landscaping and other improvements on its southern perimeter, including dredging Duck Lake.
But it needs to do more. And zoo officials, who seem taken aback by the controversy, say they will regroup and do so. George Pond, a zoo vice president, told me a “green wall” like the one at the Botanic Gardens could be difficult because it might be “fried” by the southern exposure. But Tiffany Barnhart, the zoo’s communications director, said they will put current plans to finish the exterior on hold and go “back to the drawing board,” with neighborhood groups, to select an architectural option.
Their mission: hide the wart.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter @vcarrollDP
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by e-mail or mail.
