Amagerforbrænding is a waste incineration plant in Copenhagen. Visible from just about anywhere in the city, the plant efficiently incinerates waste collected from households and businesses and turns it into district heating and electricity. In 2009, 418,000 tonnes of waste was converted to electricity and district heating for 140,000 households.
Amagerforbrænding is over 40 years old now, and construction has begun on its replacement, "Amager Bakke" (Amager Hill), which is one of the wackiest (and perhaps brilliant) ideas for a building I have seen in a while. Designed by Denmark's wonderboy architect Bjarke Ingels, the new plant will serve as a community park, with a 31,000 sq meter dry ski slope winding round the building - and every time the plant releases a ton of carbon dioxide, the chimney will blow a smoke ring to remind residents of their carbon footprint. Nice idea, but wont that make people want to release more carbon dioxide so they can see more smoke rings? Anyway you can read more about it and see the drawings here.
Amager is actually and island that makes up the southern part of Copenhagen, and has always been known as the "shit island". I always thought that was because everyone just thought it was shit (I actually lived there for 6 years), but actually it's because it is where the people of Copenhagen used to come to dump their trash - so when they started digging the foundations for the new plant, they had to deal with a lot more shit than they were planning to.
