The new area of Nordhavn is a fast growing part of Copenhagen. To meet its green ambitions the municipality needed a local recycling center. We won the competition and designed a facility where waste is treated as a resource and a meaningful environment the users enjoy visiting. This means that apart from a recycling centre Nærgenbrugsstation Nordhavn is a meeting place for the local community and hub for exchange of ideas and experience regarding recycling. The result is a state-of-the-art recycling facility where people from the local community interact and learn about the importance of seeing waste as a resource.

Visitors are welcomed by curved “material walls”. Though it looks like an artwork built of waste, it also has a practical function of nudging visitors to dispose of their waste correctly. Sorting of waste thus becomes an intuitive matter in Nordhavn adding to the effectiveness of the concept – effective waste sorting is the most important prerequisite for effective recycling.

The material wall is divided into the different fractions of materials – if you have plastic to recycle, you just need to find the wall made of plastic and go through the opening. Got some old pains of worn jeans – just go to the wall made of textile, it’s as easy as that. In this way, the material wall acts as a very low tech and intuitive wayfinding system for the visitors.

Waste is treated as a resource. In practice, this means that there are lectures, flea markets and workshops for repairing broken things. At the swap shelf the users hand in things that are still functional or just need a bit of repair. The repairs take place in the workshop of the centre. The swap allows for many different configurations that permit various activities at the centre. In the center of the swap shelf there is a seating area, making it possible to hold lectures about recycling or teaching school classes about waste.