We're in Copenhagen, Denmark
and behind me is CopenHill.
It's a waste to energy plant, which turns
the city's rubbish into heat and power.
But one of the most remarkable things about
it is that there's a dry ski slope on the roof.
It's been designed by Danish architects,
Bjarke Ingels Group, or BIG, and the whole
point is to create a dual use for the
building and to make one of the least
desirable places in the city, the place your rubbish
goes, into somewhere people actually want to visit.
My name is Bjarke Ingels, I'm the founder and
creative director of Bjarke Ingels Group or BIG.
And we are standing in Copenhagen on this human-
made mountain where you can hike, you can ski.
What's even more unique about Copenhill is that it's the
cleanest waste to energy power plant in the world.
There are no toxins coming out of the chimney, just
some steam. In this case the innovation is
the clean technology, so that meant that we could
completely reimagine what does a power plant mean.
My name is Jacob Simonson,
I'm the CEO of ARC.
Here, we produce so much energy that we are
able to make 19 Olympic-sized swimming pools
boil from zero to 200
degrees every day.
We treat waste from Copenhagen and for other
municipalities in the greater Copenhagen area.
We service out 680,000
people every day.
We get about 250 to 350 trucks a day. The waste
is then dumped into what we call the bunker.
From the bunker it is
fitted into the furnaces.
The furnaces will burn, when it burns it
will heat up the district heating water
and the other part of the water goes into
steam and that steam runs a turbine.
The last piece of the process is the
scrubbers, the big towers you see out here,
it is actually an acidic tower with calcium to take
out the environmental hazardous products
before we emit clean air and
water vapour to the environment.
In the city, you're not supposed to walk on
the grass, you have to wait for the green light,
you can't climb the facades of
the buildings. On this building,
all the things that you're normally not supposed
to do you're actually more than welcome to do.
At the tallest moment, almost 100 meters,
there is the tallest climbing wall in the world.
Here you actually have an elevator that takes you from
the foot of the mountain to the peak of the mountain.
You can look out over the city as you rise, you
can look into this Cathedral of waste-to-energy.
All along the perimeter, you
have more than 200 trees.
All the species have been chosen so they can endure
the climate almost 100 meters up in the air,
so it's this kind of natural meadow. It feels like a little
slice of Switzerland in the middle of Copenhagen.
CopenHill is a great example of Bjarke Ingels'
concept of hedonistic sustainability,
this idea that just because something's rooted in sustainability, doesn't mean it can't also be fun
and you don't have to sacrifice comfort or enjoyment
to do things that are good for the planet.
It doesn't have to be a dirty, polluting, big, ugly box that casts shadows on the neighbours and blocks the views.
The most exciting and dramatic park in the city
is now sitting on a bedrock of a power plant.
