Launched in 2021, Environmental Justice: For Vendors, by Vendors aims to transform technology and business practices within New York City’s street vending sector by:
- Dramatically reducing energy consumption and the emission of greenhouse gases and pollutants from vending carts, helping NYC to achieve its air quality and climate goals.
- Helping vendors adopt waste management practices that reduce solid waste, minimize to achieve its goal of zero waste by 2030.
- Integrating street vendors in planning for urban resilience through a robust understanding of street vendors’ climate vulnerability and contributions to NYC’s unique adaptive capacity.
STEP 1: VENDOR SURVEY
As part of a historic citywide census of street vendors, SVP surveyed a sample of 200 vendors about their needs when it came to energy, waste management, and resilience to the impacts of climate change. The survey also captured vendors’ concerns about their current exposure to environmental and health hazards, their current operating expenditures related to energy, and other operating challenges they face day to day.
SVP and HR&A analyzed the landscape of healthy, green street vending technology with a focus on low-carbon and renewable energy alternatives to propane. Given baseline requirements emerging from the vendor survey, the landscape analyzed the likelihood of alternative energy solutions to penetrate the NYC vending market based on their level of power generation, environmental and public health impacts, affordability, ease of use, ease of maintenance, and technical feasibility.
STEP 2: LANDSCAPE RESEARCH
STEP 3: DESIGN LAB
As a final step, SVP and HR&A convened experts and advocates from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds in an intensive problem-solving and goal-setting session. The design lab aimed to:
- Cultivate a shared understanding of the most significant hurdles that NYC vendors face, ranging from the technical to the political.
- Articulate a set of minimum standards—ranging from technical specifications, to cost, to portability—for any tangible solutions that emerge from the 2022 design competition.
- Identify a set of policy, legal, and infrastructural transformations that must happen in parallel to facilitate this transformation
Environmental Justice for Vendors, by Vendors 