Landfills appear all over the world. In New York city alone there are about 96 former landfills. The Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island was the largest and the last one being closed.
Garbage is something of all times. As long as there have been people there has been garbage. It’s a proof of human activity. Think about objects and tools archeologists have found that date from the Stone Age. These objects are exposed in museums and aren’t considered as garbage but as valuable artifacts that learn us a lot about history and culture. Nowadays there is a new profession related to archeology, the so called garbologists who dig in landfills looking for layers of civilization, with the oldest layer at the bottom and the newest layer at the top of the hill. Garbologists can learn us a lot about who we are, what products we used to like, who much we consumed, … And since we produce more and more garbage, history can be reconstructed more precise. This is a chance to see garbage more as an opportunity or even a resource, since the recent remining of landfills, than a pile of dirt.
Landfills were created out of concern for the public health in the beginning of the 20th century. Until the 1860s people were still dumping their garbage, ashes and dead animals on the streets. Which resulted in a really bad smell, vermin and lots of diseases. The NYC government took care of this by taking the garbage out on barges and dumping it into the ocean. Then followed by burning the waste in incinerators since 1885, then dumping in landfills and eventually recycling since 1989. In 1895, Colonel George Waring was the one that laid the foundations for the waste management system that exists in NYC today. He introduced new techniques and technology. Today New York City’s Department of Sanitation is world’s largest sanitation workforce. New York City is one of the main players in the consumer society. It produces about 38000 tons of waste per day of which 55 percent is trucked to landfills, 33 percent is recycled and 14 percent is burned.
By now, most landfills have reached their maximal capacity and are being capped and covered with an even grassed surface. These artificial hills form a strange and intriguing landscape. You immediately see and feel this great void, this great nothingness in the landscape and a misplaced road. The fence adds to this air of mystery. The only things that might give away that this once was a hill of tons of garbage, are the pipes to collect methane gas. Garbage is becoming an economic product. Methane gas is being sold as a natural gas to heat houses and dumping becomes more expensive because of the decreasing number of landfills.
But what to do with those immense unoccupied hills? Most of the time these former landfills are transformed into a golf course, a ski piste or a park. No creative program has been defined yet.
UPDATE:
Fresh Kills Park Blog posted the following movie, which adds to the idea of
landfill remining.
Focus Forward, a new series of short films about forward-thinking innovators,
brings us The Landfill, directed by Jessica Edwards and Gary Hustwit.
The film is a brief profile of the small but highly efficient
Delaware County Landfill
in Upstate New York, which is using a system of
composting, recycling, and
landfill gas (LFG) capture not unlike the
one used at Fresh Kills two decades
ago. The all-in-one facility is able
to divert 70% of its material through recycling
and composting, and
converts its LFG to electricity through incineration,
producing enough
to power 300-400 homes."
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