You’ve to hand it over to BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), a Danish architectural firm, to kill two birds with one stone. While designing a waste incineration plant in Copenhagen, Denmark, known as the CopenHill power plant, the company hit upon the idea of turning its roof into a ski slope! For €20 you can ski in the sun on this snowless artificial turf for an hour.
While the plant supplies hot water and electricity to city dwellers through waste processing, sports enthusiasts enjoy skiing on the 279-feet-high (85-meter-high) and 1,640-feet-long (500-meter-long) artificial snowless track constructed on its roof. The building also has the largest climbing wall in the world that touches an astonishing height of 262 feet (80 meters).
In addition to this, there’s also a hiking trail, several fitness facilities, children play areas, café, rooftop bars, etc. A glass elevator installed at the plant allows visitors to peek inside the plant.
Opened in October 2019, the CopenHill power plant was inaugurated by Jesper Tjäder, the Swedish slopestyle champion. The plant has the capacity to convert 440,000 tonnes of waste into energy. This caters to a hot water requirement of around 160,000 homes and an electricity requirement of 62,500 homes in the city.
The website golem13.fr in its article quotes Bjarke Ingels, thus, “We created this building with the idea of making it the greenest reprocessing center/ power plant in the world.”
The ski slope is made of a synthetic turf called neveplast that’s as slippery as the snow. Although for newcomers, the slope may feel unusual, after a few runs they do get adjusted to the surface and it starts to feel like skiing on actual snow. What’s more, there are four ski runs with varying degrees of difficulty.
With such incredible facilities, it’s not surprising that the plant hopes to attract 300,000 visitors per year.
Via: Golem13
