Kehrichtverbrennungsanlage Josef

The Kehrichtverbrennungsanlage Josef went into operation in 1904, making it the oldest waste incineration plant in Switzerland. The chimney people actually recognize today dates from the 1970s, poured upward in concrete lift by lift, a slim cylindrical column Zurich nicknamed Zigi, short for cigarette.
The plant stopped burning in 2020. City planners have talked about reviving it as a peak-load heating station, but for now the tower just stands there, doing nothing except being visible from most of the city.

Its red-white-red bands aren’t decoration. Swiss aviation rules require any structure over sixty meters to carry alternating warning stripes, with red at the very top and bottom, so pilots don’t fly into it. At ninety meters, that means five-meter bands covering thirty percent of the surface.

In the autumn of 2021, someone spray-painted KCBRYNOTMAFS across it in letters large enough to read from a departing train. It took the city’s cleaning crews and about twenty thousand francs to get it off. Two years later, the top of the chimney was fitted with something more official: a nesting box for peregrine falcons, capped with a ring of glass, built for birds that use a decommissioned smokestack as a hunting perch.