Freshkills — The World’s Largest Landfill-Turned-Park
I’m not ashamed to say that one of the most exciting things I did last weekend was visit a landfill.
But it’s not just any landfill — at one point, Fresh Kills landfill was the largest landfill in the world!
For a quick bit of history, Fresh Kills was opened on Staten Island in 1948 as a site to dump all of the household garbage coming from New York City. As the city grew, so did the landfill and at its busiest point in the late ’80s it was taking as much as 29,000 tons of trash per day!
A few years later in 1996 a law was passed by Mayor Giuliani to close the landfill by the end of 2001. The NYC Department of Sanitation thus worked to close the 4 large trash mounds and the landfill accepted it’s last delivery of garbage on March 22, 2001.
A few months later, the site was temporarily re-opened to collect debris from the World Trade Center after the September 11 attack. This added a total of 1.2 million tons of material.
In total, Fresh Kills is home to 150 million tons of garbage.
If you want to know more, the park website has a pretty amazing timeline with pictures here.
When I went to go see it, part of me was expecting to see trash everywhere, or at least more prominent indicators that this site was once a landfill. But it was actually very beautiful in sort of a post-apocalyptic way. The Department of Sanitation has ensured that the entire landfill has been safely covered and all you can see now is the new grassland vegetation that has been planted. However, as gorgeous as the new grasslands and views of the NYC skyline was, I couldn’t help but constantly be wondering what was going on underneath my feet: Which pieces of trash am I standing on? How long has it been there? Who threw it away?
One thing I learned that was interesting was that there is a whole industry for shipping trash around the country. There are companies out there who own and operate the barges who now ship all of New York City’s household garbage to landfills in Pennsylvania and Virginia. This really made an impact on me realizing when you throw something “away,” that “away” is really just someone else’s backyard.
To decide what to do with the landfill site upon closure, the city held a design competition in 2001 for the master plan of what would become Freshkills park. Landscape architecture firm Field Operations was chosen as the winner.
The covering of the landfill was also really interesting to me and the woman who gave the tour showed us in
detail the different layers of covers they had to apply. There is a Gas
Venting layer to prevent any harmful gasses from escaping, and a Drainage Net Layer to prevent any leachate from escaping, or allowing any other liquids to enter. If you’re interested, the park site has a much more comprehensive overview and does a much better job of describing the science behind it!
A few final fun facts that I learned this weekend are that it costs about $1 million per acre to close this landfill. The costs include buying all of the layering materials, soil to cover the top, and seeds to plant. The park is about 2,200 acres — so this has not been a cheap project for the city!
When completed, it will also be the largest park developed in New York since the 19th century when Central Park was established.
Finally, when the Department of Sanitation did testing on what could be planted due to worries that planting trees would puncture some of the protective layers. However, after time, they found that the tree roots were growing laterally above the layering and thus concluded that it was safe to plant trees in the park!
If there’s anything I missed, there is a great FAQ section about the timeline to when the park is going to open, what wildlife can be found there, and why it will be safe to open the park to the public. Check it out here!
