page_title: North Transfer Station
section_title: Facilities and design
hierarchical_section_title: North Transfer Station / Facilities and design
caption_attribution_description: English: The viewing room and learning center at the North Transfer Station in Seattle, a waste transfer facility.
context_page_description: The North Transfer Station, also known as the North Recycling and Disposal Station, is a municipal waste collection and distribution facility in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is located in the Wallingford neighborhood near Gas Works Park and is one of two transfer stations managed by Seattle Public Utilities.
  The original facility opened in 1968 at the site of a former city stable and garage as part of a new plan to haul garbage from Seattle to the Cedar Hills Regional Landfill rather than use local dumps. In the early 2000s, the city government proposed building a modern transfer station on the site, which was approved by Seattle Public Utilities in 2011. The old facility was closed in January 2014 and replaced by a new transfer station that opened in November 2016. It includes a community center with a viewing room, public art, green architecture, and an outdoor playground.
context_section_description: The North Transfer Station is located on a 5-acre (2.0 ha) site in southern Wallingford near Gas Works Park and the Burke-Gilman Trail on the north side of Lake Union. The sloped campus includes a main building for waste processing, an administration office, and a separate facility for reuse and recycling. Its main entrance is on North 34th Street, which has a set of five scales and queuing space for up to 50 vehicles. The main building on the site is two stories and has 65,000 square feet (6,000 m²) of floor space, with a tipping floor and underground compactors that feed into transport trailers. It was designed by Mahlum Architects with environmentally friendly features, including a green roof, skylights, rooftop solar panels, improved ventilation, and on-site stormwater treatment. The main building's roof was sunk below the northern street level using a series of tri-chorded steel trusses that would allow for an open tipping floor. The waste facility and adjoining reuse and recycle building can handle up to 750 short tons (680 t) of materials per day.
  The main building also has an education and viewing room on the second floor that overlooks the tipping floor. It includes scale models of vehicles used at the transfer station, historic photos of garbage collection, and exhibits on recycling and composting. The education center was named in 2011 for J. P. Patches, a local television clown who was known as the "Mayor of the City Dump". The east side of the transfer station facing Woodlawn Avenue North has a small park with a playground, basketball court, seating areas, and exercise equipment. The main building has a public plaza with an outdoor sculpture, "Reclaimed" by Jean Shin, that uses 10,000 feet (3,000 m) of salvaged steel rebar from the original facility to depict the topography of the site before the 1960s.
  The design of the facility has been praised by critics for its environmentally-friendly features and public amenities that are not commonly found at waste facilities. It received LEED Gold certification and was awarded a 2019 COTE Top Ten Award from the American Institute of Architects in 2019. The roof truss system was recognized with a national technical award from the American Institute of Steel Construction in 2018.
caption: The North Transfer Station's education and viewing room, which overlooks the tipping floor
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