Fresh Kills Landfill Turns a New Leaf

According to the Earth Institute’s Steven Cohen, New York City generates up to 36,200 tons of garbage every day, 13,000 tons of which is picked up by the city’s Department of Sanitation. From 2000—before Fresh Kills was closed—to 2008, the city went from paying $658 million a year to deal with garbage to more than $1 billion. Most of that rise, Cohen says, is due to the cost of moving trash that can no longer be disposed of within New York City.

“We collect garbage with trucks that run on diesel, then dump it on the floor of transfer stations, scoop it up and truck it to New Jersey and Pennsylvania,” Cohen explains. It’s not environmentally friendly, consuming much more energy and releasing many more emissions than if the city were trucking waste to Fresh Kills.

Cohen and Themelis are both supporters of Waste to Energy, or WTE, a system where municipal waste is burned—making electricity and reducing the volume of trash eventually landfilled. Themelis says that WTE is far cleaner than many other energy production options. Some New York City trash already goes to WTE sites, but only around 7.5 percent, while Themelis says 63 percent goes to landfills.

“Until we figure out the more permanent solution, which is generating less trash, incinerators are better,” says NYU’s Robin Nagle, who worked for several years driving garbage trucks for the Department of Sanitation in New York City. Cohen suggests that making things more local could help. “We should do this by neighborhood,” he says. “No one likes dealing with other people’s waste.”

Because trucking waste out of the city is so expensive and carbon-intensive, Nagle and others also think that Fresh Kills may have been closed too soon from both a financial and environmental perspective. “If you’re standing in Staten Island, Fresh Kills was closed too late,” says Nagle. “But if you’re thinking in terms of getting rid of New York City’s waste, it was closed too early.”

There doesn’t seem to be much debate over whether having a park instead of a landfill will be better for Staten Islanders, though many at an April 9, 2008 meeting to discuss the first section of the park project voiced worries about construction, traffic and safety.

The Park

The design for the park was selected from a group of finalists in 2001 as part of an international architecture competition, held as the landfill closed its gates for good. The winning architects were the group Field Operations, which has laid out the park to include sport and wilderness areas, education facilities and recreation.

The four landfill mounds, north, south, east and west, will make up half of the park’s total area, and the rest will be surrounding wetlands and low-lying areas. In its full glory, the park is going to be 2,200 acres, almost three times the size of Central Park, and it should take 30 years to complete. “It’s easy to feel overwhelmed,” Marrella says, “but we’ll take manageable bites.”

The first bite will involve the creation of a narrow strip leading from a neighborhood park to the Fresh Kills creek, Ellen Neises, an architect at Field Operations, explained during the April meeting. The design for the section includes a bike and walking path, a picnic meadow and an observation tower for long views and bird watching.

There will also be an agricultural and educational component, including a tree nursery and a long hillside of what Neises described as “seed farms.” In raised beds, seed from plant species that are native to Staten Island will be cultivated and harvested to create a bank of material that will later be used to plant the rest of the project. “It will really be a lab for different methods for the rest of the park,” said Eloise Hirsch, the Fresh Kills park administrator.

At the April meeting, Neises and Hirsch explained that the renovation of the community area, Schmul Park, will start first in early 2009. Construction on the small section of landfill park, with an estimated cost of $11 million, should begin later in the year.

You can see the site of this first section from the top of the north mound—a long strip running from a commercial mall at the edge of the landfill to the sluice of the creek. Around a mile away is the summit of the south mound, where, in clear weather, you can see the Manhattan skyline and, peeking shyly over a hill, the parachute jump at Brooklyn’s Coney Island. Supposedly, in the right conditions, it is a four-borough-view.

Even though the project as a whole will take 30 years to complete, Marrella says that he is often surprised by how park-like the landfill has become just in the years since it stopped receiving waste. “We see deer and birds,” he says. Stands of trees planted experimentally are already tall and shading. From the peak of any of the mounds, the landscape looks like any other undulating grassy blanket.

“It has such a graceful curve,” says Marrella. “It almost looks like a park already.”

Also on Scienceline:

Environmentalists fight to save local oysters.

New Jersey-ans reward recycling.

A video about New York City’s first eco-friendly florist.