How the world’s largest garbage dump evolved into a green oasis

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/nyregion/freshkills-garbage-dump-nyc.html

by mcone • 6 years ago

77 43 6 years ago

Interesting. How are they managing the continued break-down of the garbage that's still buried a few (dozen?) feet below?

The article doesn't convince me that this dump is totally reformed, just that life has developed on top. This also isn't a "sustainable" solution as we will continue to need dumps for the foreseeable future...

aeternum• 6 years ago

They've been doing this in the midwest for quite awhile. Many cities simply build a park on top of the dump when it fills up. Methane buildup is still an issue but I believe some cities actually pipe it into town and burn it for heat.

Fezzik• 6 years ago

Same out West - if you live in Seattle, the park right next to The Pits on Lake Washington (where the pits are for Sea-fair hydroplane races) used to be a landfill. My grandparents grew up across the street from it. It doesn’t smell at all.

hinkley3• 6 years ago

Because landfills are not meant to break down. If they did, that would mean who-knows-what kinds of fluids leaching into groundwater, and that would be very bad.

They cap them with materials designed to make sure water sheds off the top of the landfill instead of percolating through.

So essentially we've capped these things, but they're intended to stay as they are now basically forever. Stop me if you've heard this one before.

pottertheotter2• 6 years ago

There can be quite a bit of organic material in SWFs that breaks down, although most of that process is completed within ~20 years of being deposited. Modern facilities often incorporate electricity generation plants powered by all of the methane produced from the breakdown of organics. Also, a landfill has a bottom liner that is usually much more robust than the top (a couple feet of clay and a thick membrane) plus leaching pipes to carry away leachate. I don't believe the final cap is intended to completely shed water, but it is meant to divert a lot of it from getting into the landfill.

gumby• 6 years ago

This approach was taken with the Mountain View dump next to Google (and Palo Alto’s next door). Shoreline amphitheater And the nearly Park/lake (next to where Google is now) was built on it; I went to the first few shows when it opened and remember smoky emissions from the seating area — not from the audience I mean.

The flat area where the office buildings are was a bean field. When shoreline opened. I used to walk from my office, cutting through years farm, to go to shoreline. Then SGI and J&J built buildings there (which later became the Google campus) and the park and amphitheater just seem to most people to be part of the landscape. Which is great!

pottertheotter2• 6 years ago

I grew up in Sunnyvale in the 80s and this made me nostalgic for the old days of Silicon Valley. I had always heard that sometimes the gas from the dump would ignite from smokers at concerts. I guess it's true!

"In its opening year, a fan attending a Steve Winwood concert flicked a cigarette lighter and ignited methane that had been leaking from a landfill beneath the theatre. Several small fires were reported that season. After those incidents, the city of Mountain View commissioned methane testing studies to define the location of methane vapors emanating from the soil within the amphitheater. These tests were used in developing a design for improved methane monitoring and more efficient methane extraction to ensure the amphitheater became safe as an outdoor venue. Ultimately, the lawn was removed, a gas barrier and methane removal equipment were installed, and then the lawn was re-installed."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoreline_Amphitheatre

colechristensen• 6 years ago

oh, i think this explains why i think mountain view smells bad, i thought it was just the bay

DrAwdeOccarim• 6 years ago

I'm a little confused. I'm pretty sure they kept this dump open specifically so they could dispose of the Sept 11 attack detritus. How could the NYT miss that detail so completely?

Edit: It's even in fucking wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresh_Kills_Landfill#September...

Boy I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder...

jasonv• 6 years ago

From the article:

"The South Mound was capped in 1996, the North Mound the next year. Shortly after that last barge arrived in 2001, the park’s design contest, sponsored by the Municipal Arts Society, was complicated when debris from the World Trade Center disaster wound up in Fresh Kills, now buried in the West Mound."

lhorie• 6 years ago

You hope someone lost their livelihood due to the perception that they did not write down a piece of trivia in an article? Geez. I get the magnitude of 9/11, but the hyperbole seems misplaced here.

tomjakubowski• 6 years ago

It's a line from the Simpsons, so I think it was meant as a self-deprecating joke. Though the reference is a little out of nowhere. (I guess there was the episode where The Who played a concert on top of Springfield's garbage dump)

taneq2• 6 years ago

I get the magnitude of 9/11

Equivalent to the last three days of COVID-19 deaths?

BrianB• 6 years ago

That dump used to stink somewhere between pine sol (I think they used to try and cover up the smell with something?) and rotting trash. And it is right in the middle of the island so any time you had to drive anywhere on the highway you passed it and got to enjoy the smell.

I would never set foot on that land, god only knows what horrible toxic stuff has been dumped there.

ohgreatwtf• 6 years ago

covers up rotting pile/hole/toxic waste nature is healing!

TedShiller• 6 years ago

I don't know if this is supposed to be a propaganda piece, but nothing about that dump is an "oasis". If you've driven by there, and I have many times, it smells so awful you have to close your car windows and turn off the car ventilation. It smells absolutely rotten and toxic. I worry for people who live and grow up in the vicinity.

Underneath the soil, everything there is toxic, a mix of whatever people put in landfills. Of course it will seep liquids into the ground eventually, despite the waterproof layer underneath, it's only a matter of time.

I acknowledge and appreciate the positive intentions, but we should not fool ourselves into viewing this a success. To do so would be an act of denial, and would be dangerous for our planet's health.

spodek• 6 years ago

What else can this piece be but propaganda?

Covered over is not clean. This piece is disgusting. Is it really trying to claim that because it has green plants that it is clean?

The author must consider Chernobyl lovely too.

melling• 6 years ago

Now NYC puts its trash on trains and sends it hundreds of miles away.

A lot of recycling now goes there too since China stopped taking American recycling.

foolmeonce• 6 years ago

Definitely. The lands around Chernobyl are lovely now compared to inhabitable places in the region.. It could make the center piece in a parody of this kind of green-on-the-surface PR somewhat in line with parodies of clean coal.

Ozzie_osman• 6 years ago

It also doesn't even look pretty in the pictures.

voidhorse• 6 years ago

As someone who grew up in SI and could smell the stench of the dump while my parents drove down amboy road as a kid, I can confirm that, even if a smell lingers, it is far more palatableand less intense and all encompassing than it once was. While it was an active dump you could smell it for miles. It was disgusting. I’m not claiming the original dump should be forgiven, but it seems quite cynical and ineffective to tarnish what has been pretty objectively a positive environmental development for Staten Island residents. We’re not talking about a small feat either. This was one of the largest dumping grounds in the world.

I don’t think the times piece is by any means suggesting that such disasters are completely reversible and that we should therefore commit more of them—it just highlights a positive turnaround project which we’ll certainly need more of in the coming years if we’re going to save the planet.

vosper• 6 years ago

> nothing about that dump is an "oasis”
I can confirm that, even if a smell lingers, it is far more palatableand less intense and all encompassing than it once was

Sounds like you’re in agreement with the statement that it’s far from an oasis?

pizza234• 6 years ago

we’ll certainly need more of in the coming years if we’re going to save the planet.

How does that contribute to saving the planet? It's as close as it gets to "sweeping the dust under the rug".

This has been satirized brilliantly in the Simpsons' episode "Trash of the titans", and I'm very perplexed how, while the episode is undoubtedly horrifying, an initiative like this can be perceived as laudable.

DoctorOetker• 6 years ago

I don’t think the times piece is by any means suggesting that such disasters are completely reversible

it's calling it more than reversible, it's calling it a green oasis

aaron6953• 6 years ago

Contradicting lie #142 from the environmental movement.

The worse you make land for humans the better it is for the environment. See... anything radioactive.

CuriousCosmic• 6 years ago

To be fair, this area will have the exact same problem that regions with radiation problems have. Nature will reclaim the area but it won't be "healthy" nature. The animals will have increased health problems due to toxins (or radiation) from the environment.

The only reason ecosystems rebound in areas where there are radiation problems is because nobody is there to hunt or deter them. Had there not been the city Chernobyl, nature would be far better off. The same goes for this landfill. Had it not been created, the area would be far healthier.

aaron6953• 6 years ago

The animals will have increased health problems due to toxins (or radiation) from the environment.

No. This isn't correct.

The problem with these areas is the might increase cancer a small amount. Animals don't care about cancer or toxins, it's only rich present day humans that do.

Hunter and Gathers living at Chernobyl wouldn't care at all as long as they don't go in the building.

This is the biblical fear that's the problem.

Yes, as an ultra rich person I would not live on this landfill, but even for at least 40% of humans in the current world they'd be better off living on the landfill.

If you care about the environment, create more rubbish, the more landfill, the more oasis's of green the environment gets.

taneq2• 6 years ago

What? Literally nobody says that.

You might be thinking of "if humans go away, even if the land is horribly toxic, life finds a way to re-colonise it."

011000112• 6 years ago

Today's garbage dumps will be tomorrow's resource deposits. I suspect the concentration of many raw materials is greater in the dump than it is in many active mines.

repiret• 6 years ago

There is no case where it’s economic to mine a landfill where it’s not more economic for the landfill operator to sort recyclable materials from the incoming trash.

Given that private landfill operators don’t generally do that, we can conclude that the raw materials in a landfill actually aren’t so concentrated or easily extractable to be of any use.

owenversteeg• 6 years ago

While you're correct in a simple short-term scenario, there is one very big hole in that argument: if the composition of the incoming trash changes over time. Which it does. Plenty of things were not recognized as valuable at the time they were thrown away.

There's the classic example of low-background steel, but there are more arcane things as well: an old high school teacher of mine bragged that he salvaged a large amount of discarded old wood planks, worth as much as a nice new car! Even common items may help factor in to making recycling old dumps economical (until recent years, an enormous amount of consumer electronics, containing precious metals, were simply tossed in the trash.)

One way I could easily see this becoming big fast is from some sort of law enforcing a heavy carbon tax or pollutant tax. Steel production is highly polluting and currently nobody pays the true price of things (including their carbon footprint.) If a government takes one of these steps - which I could totally see happening - then people will definitely consider mining landfills.

011000112• 6 years ago

That assumes sorting will not become cheaper over time. Technology will progress and the cost of raw materials extracted naturally may rise and make landfill mining more economical than dealing with the current waste stream.

Even if the materials were sorted today on the way in, it may not be economical to do anything with them, so storing them in a sorted landfill could make sense.

jacknews• 6 years ago

"Imagine Central Park with trash mounds 20 stories high. Now imagine that times three."

Are there no old photos?

Or would that be too evocative of what lies below?

m4rtink• 6 years ago

Well, big part of Tokyo is built on artifical islands filled in with garbage. Some of the most lucrative places including Ginza are like that. :)

rasengan0• 6 years ago

Shiny happy plastic everywhere https://youtu.be/-dk3NOEgX7o

awiesenhofer• 6 years ago

Tangentially: Is heat threatment at all a thing in the US? With articles like this about landfills it never seems to be mentioned much while its the norm, i think even required by law (before dumping), here in europe.

throwaway_pdp09• 6 years ago

If you leave something 20 years, trees will start growing pretty rapidly. They even mention deliberate tree planting, but in the pics there are few trees and those present look like they're struggling. Looks like it's mainly grass because that's what can cope, not because it's a plant eden of any sort.

Arborists please chip in.

How the world’s largest garbage dump evolved into a green oasis

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