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No Snow Required

A city in Europe turned a garbage plant into a fun attraction

By By Jeanette Ferrara and Jacqueline Adams
From the February 2021 Issue

Learning Objective: Students will convert metric measurements of length using the dimensions of attractions at a snowless ski slope.

Lexile: 870L; 720L
People skiing down a green ramp with no snow

Niels Quist/Alamy Stock Photo

In Copenhagen, Denmark, a power plant also functions as a snowless ski slope!

People looking for fun in the city of Copenhagen, Denmark, can head to a new attraction known as CopenHill. There, they can ski or snowboard down a special snowless slope. 

The slope is covered in soil and grass. A layer of plastic bristles coated in an oily substance allows skiers to glide over the slope as if it were covered in snow. Visitors can also explore hiking trails or scale a 20-story climbing wall. It’s the tallest ever built on the side of a building!

Factories in a city

Gonzales Photo/Alamy Stock Phot

But there’s more to this artificial mountain than fun and games. Beneath the slope is a waste-to-energy plant. The facility burns the city’s garbage to make electricity and heat. Every year, the plant burns about 400,000 tons of trash, powering and heating thousands of homes in the process. The plant also keeps trash out of landfills. 

CopenHill Waste-to-Energy Plant
Watch a video about skiing down a snowless, man-made hill.
World map of Denmark

Jim McMahon/Mapman®

CopenHill’s ski slope is made of a steel frame covered with concrete slabs. The slabs contain steel mesh and hollow spaces. This makes them stronger and lighter than regular concrete. That allows the structure to hold the weight of soil, plants, and as many as 1,500 visitors at once!

Peter Madsen Nordestgaard is an engineer who helped build the facility. He hopes other cities will build similar multiuse structures. “I hope this will be a milestone,” he says.

Converting Measurement Units
Watch a math helper video about how to convert between units of measurement using a real-world example.

Now You Try It

Use what you know about measurement conversions to answer the questions.

The ski slope at CopenHill is 500 meters long. Complete the table to determine that length in centimeters.

Graph showing the distance in meters and in centimeters

The climbing wall is 10 meters wide. Find its width in decimeters.

Visitors can run, hike, or climb to the top of  CopenHill. The shortest path is 45,000 centimeters long. What is that distance in meters?

CopenHill offers a training facility 0.078 km up the hill. How many decameters is that? 

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