Seaweed Farming and Wetlands in a Box: How Governors Island Has Become a Climate Lab

A seaweed nursery. In-sink wastewater treatment. Man-made floating marshes.

Those are just some of the concepts taking physical shape in a real-world laboratory: Governors Island.

Throughout the island, entrepreneurs and nonprofits are testing initiatives and products aiming to advance solutions to the climate crisis, which will have special demonstrations open to the public this weekend

It’s part of a program spearheaded by the Trust for Governors Island to support innovations that focus on water: cleaning it, conserving it, making use of it as a resource and fostering habitats within it.

Six initiatives received $10,000 grants and access to a shared pool of $100,000 to jumpstart projects, as well as space on the island to install the equipment needed to pilot the ideas.

They run the gamut from  air quality monitoring efforts by community group South Bronx Unite, carbon dioxide removal from a company called Vycarb and a vertical hydroponic farm in a shipping container, managed by the nonprofit GrowNYC.

Using Governors Island’s waterfront, parkland and facilities as a lab enables the inventors to see their ideas in action to tweak and ultimately scale the projects.

Taken together, the projects represent a “much more optimistic vision for how a city can look when it’s truly sustainable and truly resilient,” said Trust President and CEO Clare Newman on Thursday, the island’s first climate demonstration day.

The public can check out the projects and chat with the people behind them during a free, science fair-like event on Saturday .

Cleaner Greywater

Among the projects that marked their debut on the island is a miniature wastewater treatment system from Cycleau . Visitors who approach an outdoor sink on the Parade Ground may notice a silver box beneath, and those who use a bathroom closer to Yankee Pier might see a blue box under the sink, too. These boxes filter and clean the greywater as it comes out of the drain, before it hits the city sewer system.

The city’s sewers handle both stormwater and wastewater, so when it rains significantly, untreated water — from sinks, laundry and toilets — can’t make it to the treatment plants, and instead flows directly into the ocean, rivers and creeks.

“We found that if we can actually treat wastewater where it’s being generated below the sinks, showers and laundry units, we can effectively reduce the amount of pollutants that ultimately end up overflowing into every time it rains,” said Noemi Florea, founder of Cycleau.

If every residential bathroom in the city installed a Cylceau unit, it’d lead to a nearly 50% reduction of  the wastewater that enters water bodies, according to estimates by Shambhavi Gupta, a graduate student at Columbia University analyzing the technology’s impact as part of an internship for Cycleau.

Ideally, Florea said, “individual homeowners purchase and collectively participate in this wastewater treatment, or the property developer.”

“You’re able to actually develop a network of these water treatment units that are much easier to deploy and scale than trying to invest in these one-off large infrastructure projects,” she added.

Each unit costs about $1,200 to produce, but Florea said she expects the retail price to be about $350 as she scales up. Since installing the units at Governors Island, she said she’s been getting interest from businesses and individuals hoping to use the technology.

Shoring Up the Shore

Some projects that have been first tried elsewhere can now expand or take shape in a different form at Governors Island as part of the recent piloting effort.

Seaweed City, for instance, had its roots growing kelp in Newtown Creek as a way to possibly improve water quality, as THE CITY previously reported . On the island, the team will now set up the city’s first seaweed nursery and experiment growing warm-water species.

“We imagine seaweed farms being as common as community gardens in New York City,” said Shanjana Mahmud, a founder.

Others are testing efforts to create “living shorelines,” in order to bring natural elements to otherwise hard or rigid structures, providing erosion protection and habitats for plant and animal life.

A company called Object Territories installed concrete “Intertidal Objects” in Hong Kong, and now along the Governors Island shoreline. In the water, the geometric structures allow organisms to grow within and around them and restore an ecosystem on the shoreline.

Another group, Just EcoCities, makes planter boxes that fill with water during high tides and filter it out during low tides, essentially functioning as wetlands. Brooklyn nonprofit RETI Center is using Governors Island as the third site for its floating marsh gardens, made of recycled materials and constructed by local high schoolers.

Yazmeen Abdel, 17, helped create it.

“We’ve seen the marsh kind of grow already… We’ve seen the birds come,” she said. “It’s kind of nice to see it — like all the work we did, actually out in the ocean.”

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