MOVE Systems: redesigning NYC's 1970s-era food trucks for an eco-friendly future.
Making the less-noxious food cart into an art.
There are 5,000 licensed food carts in New York, and they’re as much of an urban icon as the MTA’s subway signage or the Chrysler building. Too bad they’re killing the planet.
It’s not the food—the grub is OK, if not exactly slimming; it’s the gas generators powering the carts. Most food carts run off a diesel generator that’s designed to run only a few hours. Vendors run them for stretches of up to 14 hours, leading to a high output of greenhouse-gas emissions such as carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, and particulate matter. You can see the smoke with the naked eye, but the hard facts are even more frightening: The research and consulting firm Energy Vision found that each cart produces the same amount of nitrous oxide as 186 cars on the road.
A new pilot program between the city and a Queens-based company called MOVE Systems aims to cut down on that pollution by at least 60 percent. For the past year, MOVE has been fine-tuning a new kind of food cart—called the MRV100—that’s powered by a mix of battery-generated electricity and solar energy, instead of dirty gas. The plan calls for getting a fleet of 500 new carts up and running by the summer of 2016, with the first 100 slated to roll out this summer.
For a 40-or-so-year-old design, the typical food cart is actually pretty sturdy and resilient. “The quality is surprisingly good,” says Michael Dubrovsky, a co-founder of Simply Grid, which merged with Mobile Vending Natural Gas a year ago to form MOVE Systems. It’s good enough that MOVE initially planned to retrofit existing food carts with products akin to electric vehicle chargers, rather than manufacturing an entirely new line of carts. Then they took a closer look under the hood to discover that none of these carts has the same design. “Each one is made artisanally in Queens and Brooklyn, at what we call chop shops,” Dubrovsky says. “Each one has different compartments, the plumbing is not up to code, so by the time you rip all that out, all of a sudden you’ve put liability on yourself.” So MOVE had to scrap the magpie carts and start from scratch.
One hundred of the first carts will be funded by MOVE and reserved for disabled veterans, and the remaining 400 will go to vendors who sign up—at no cost to them, because the pilot program will be sponsored. (MOVE says they are still reviewing sponsors and advertisers and have yet to make a selection.) Vendors will still have to shoulder the costs of the compressed natural gas fuel (but not Internet connectivity), but Energy Vision’s report also suggests that running a food cart on grid power could save $5,200 a year in energy charges.