The Manhattan Times

From solar panels to recycling, seminar teaches buildings how to go green

by Daniel P. Bader

The greening of Northern Manhattan’s buildings continues to grow.

The residents of Cabrini Terrace, the 19-story co-op apartment building on W. 190th Street between Ft. Washington Avenue and Cabrini Boulevard, are enjoying the benefits of the green movement. In 2007 solar panels were installed on the roof of the 217-unit building to produce electricity, reducing energy costs.

Residents still pay market rate when the bill comes, but the savings from the panels have been put towards the common fees everyone pays, lowering shareholders’ maintenance costs.

But there’s another benefit to the panels.

“There was a feeling of pride in the building and a sense of unity,” said Laura Hembree, who lives at Cabrini Terrace and works as a real estate agent at Simone Song Properties.

It’s also attractive to potential new owners in the building.

“It’s definitely a selling point,” Hembree said. “People are very happy about that.”

At 100 Overlook Terrace residents have joined together to form a green committee to start environmentally friendly programs at the 169-unit co-op.

“There’s a fair amount of resident sentiment to do green stuff,” said resident and green committee organizer Bill Ferns.

There was a lot more interest before the economy turned last year, he added, but residents are still trying to do the small things, like battery and textile recycling.

“In the laundry rooms we’ve put motion sensors” to automatically regulate the overhead lights, he said. Most of the common lighting, like in the hallways, has been transitioned to compact florescent lighting, he added.

An architect who lives in the building has drawn up plans for a green roof, and the idea of solar panels has been tossed around.

“The thing is they require huge capital investment,” Ferns said.

Other local residents who want to learn about how to make their buildings green can attend a one-day seminar on Tue., Oct. 6 called “Green from the Ground Up” at the Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial, Cultural and Educational Center, on Broadway and W. 165th Street.

The event, co-sponsored by the non-profit Council on the Environment of New York City's Office of Recycling Outreach and Education, the non-profit group Solar One and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s Go Green Washington Heights and Inwood, is the second event of its kind in the city.

In March the first seminar attracted 40 people from the Lower East Side to learn strategies for how residential buildings can improve recycling, increase energy efficiency and create more environmental rooftops.

The Oct. 6 event plans to build on that success with three seminars.

Christina Salvi from the Office of Recycling Outreach will host “Navigating New York’s Recycling Landscape,” the easiest and quickest way to green a building.

“The audience here is anyone who can make a decision in the building,” Salvi said, such as co-op board members or superintendents.

Her presentation will show building managers “best practices” for recycling and garbage disposal in a building.

“You want it to be easy for tenants,” Salvi said. Proper labeling, making sure bins are always located in the same place and that the right materials are placed in each bin will encourage compliance in a building.

Waste could also be reduced by collecting non-curbside pick up items like clothing and other textiles. Salvi said superintendents and building managers have attested to how much of their garbage is towels, clothes or carpets. At the seminar will also be a composting bin for organic materials, the bulk of trash. Innovative recycling like composting gets tenants excited, Salvi said.

Going green is also about tending to a building’s energy consumption, where little things go a long way. The Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation’s Dan Rieber has help buildings become more energy efficient since McDonald’s still served Big Macs in Styrofoam boxes. NIMIC helps buildings with low and moderate income tenants through the state and city’s 70-percent matching weatherization program.

Rieber will discuss how NIMIC helped the landlord of 515 W. 156th St. insulate the roof, replace the windows with energy efficient panes, get the hot water system operating more efficiently and repair exterior doors to keep heat from being lost. Those efforts, plus insulating all the basement pipes, have reduced the boiler’s work load, Rieber said.

Once the retrofitted building has gone through a year of bills and cold weather the landlord and NIMIC will know how effective their efforts have been.

Even if a building doesn’t qualify, learning about some of the ways Rieber’s project building saved energy could get the green thoughts going about any building.

The third discussion will be about options for building roofs. A representative from Aeon Solar, a company that sells solar panels, will discuss how installing the panels could help with bills, like in Cabrini Terrace.

Aeon Solar’s Rob Ashmore said actually installing solar panels is the easy part. Depending on the size of the project, it could take up to six months to burn through all the paper work and bureaucracy to get approval – one of the biggest hang ups in solarizing the city, he said.

The benefits are many, however, and the incentive great.

“The incentives in New York City are the best in the country,” Ashmore said, including a 50-percent tax credit.

“We haven’t done a lot of co-ops because of their tricky tax situation,” he added, but as Cabrini Terrace has proven, it’s not impossible.

There are also other options for the roof, says Green from the Ground Up organizer Diana Pangestu, like white roofs – roofs painted a light color to reflect sun rather than absorb the heat or green roofs.

“They’re great for aesthetic value,” she said. “It also acts as an insulation barrier.”

“Going Green from the Ground Up” is scheduled for Tue., Oct. 6 from 6-9pm. To RSVP, email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or call 212-785-0734.

Editor's Note: The original version of this article misstated that the Office of Recycling Outreach and Education is a city agency. It is a branch of the non-profit agency Council on the Environment of New York City.

The Manhattan Times is the bilingual newspaper of Washington Heights and Inwood.