Garbage Juice:
How Staten Island’s Freshkills Went From Trash to Treasure
“New York City, so good at so many things, notably public transit, remains terrible at garbage”
We humans create too much trash. Our social values are exposed everyday when we disregard and discard useful items that other cultures covet. New York City was always behind the curve in finding a solution to the problem of trash. In her essay “Trash in the City” (2016), Lucy R. Lippard writes, “New York City, so good at so many things, notably public transit, remains terrible at garbage”( 144). Fresh Kills landfill was opened in 1947 as a temporary site but soon became New York City’s principal waste dump for 54 years. It was not only once the largest landfill in the world--a 2,200 acre site, two and a half times the size of Central Park--(stylistic device: Creative Punctuation) but also it held the distinction as the only man-made object other than the Great Wall of China that could be seen from space. From serious health effects, to environmental hazards, to diminished quality of life, and reduced property values, Fresh Kills landfill was a stunning example of the massive toll of our human habits. It is also an example of the evolution of a big problem, its creation, its stagnation, and then finally its solution.
The history of Fresh Kills landfill on New York’s tiny Staten Island stresses our need to address the problem of trash. As the largest city in the world’s most wasteful country, The Big Apple serves as a striking illustration of our “throwaway culture.” The landfill generates over 50,000 tons of trash each day. In her essay Lippard explains, “Capitalism thrives on unsustainable growth and expansion while its byproducts, its waste, also grow and expand exponentially” (Lippard 142). This current disposable lifestyle is the biggest reason this problem persists. Secondly, as New York is the most densely populated city in the United States, and being small in size as far as land mass, the available land for the disposing of garbage is simply non-existent. For decades, the residents of Staten Island have felt like they’ve been treated like the city’s “forgotten borough.” As well as being saddled with the stigma of being dumped on, by receiving 100 percent of the four other boroughs’ residential garbage, Staten Island residents also endured decades of the unbearable stench in their neighborhoods. Most concerning to them though was the health hazards of inhaling (stylistic device: Strong Active Verbs) the emissions from the dump. Then of course, the environment at large, shouldered the devastating effects from the five tons of methane gas it emitted daily. Despite years of complaints, lawsuits and even a move to secede from the rest of New York City, the landfill managed to exist for over 50 years.
The politics and economics of transporting waste to other locations kept the problem alive much longer than reasonable. Finally, in March of 2001 the landfill was abruptly closed due to the election of three Republican politicians who owed their victories to the people of Staten Island. After the tangled bureaucratic history, it seemed that the nightmare was over and the healing could begin with a plan to transform the dump into a public park almost three times the size of Central Park (stylistic device: Periodic Sentence). This plan was briefly diverted when the landfill needed to reopen temporarily as sorting ground and then burial site for personal effects, and the human and architectural remains from Ground Zero. A memorial is planned for this portion of the upcoming community park.
The New York Sanitation and Parks and Recreation departments have committed to collaborate for decades to develop Freshkills Park. The mounds of trash are being capped with impermeable plastic and eight additional layers of barrier material to separate the ground we touch and walk on from the waste dump below. There will be extensive underground piping and drainage channels at work to capture and repurpose leachate, also known as “garbage juice,” and the damaging methane gas will be harvested on site to provide energy to 20,000 homes. The rehabilitated Fresh Kills will offer a human made wetland buffer for neighborhoods threatened by future storms. The new and improved Freshkills will be an open public space with paths and waterways accessible by canoe, kayak, foot, horseback, bike or car. It will have diverse wildlife refuges and research and educational facilities. Tree planting and other beautification efforts have been accelerated. Perhaps the park will serve as a symbolic re-payment, both emotional and environmental for the people of Staten Island.
FreshKills landfill always stood as an extreme example of the garbage problem in the world and, as a spokesperson for the New York Department of Parks and Recreation stated, as “a reminder of wastefulness, excess, and environmental neglect”(New York Department of Parks and Recreation spokesperson). (stylistic device: Use of Dialogue) But in her New York Times article, Lisa W. Foderaro paints a picture of the future plans to construct Freshkills Park, and how Freshkills landfill will go from a “dump to a paragon of ecology.” Foderaro explains, as befits what used to be the world’s largest landfill, the future of Freshkills could represent the planet’s greatest act of ecological payment. The really interesting thing about Freshkills Park from a design and implementation view-point is how long a process it will be to realize the vision of the park. The planned phases of implementation stretch out over decades, partly because of funding but also because of the developmental approach the designers and planners are taking. The park is primarily separated into 4 different sections, different mounds of trash, that were capped at different times and are now being retaken by nature and seeded and shaped by NYC Parks. There have been some small projects (sports fields and greenways) that have fully opened to the public, but the city is also allowing the public into the site for various public events throughout the year, including, kayaking, hiking, kite flying, and so on.
Wishing to learn more about the status of Freshkills Park today and New York’s trash problem, I decided to reach out to Jonathan Tarleton, Department of Urban Studies and planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There were a few things that I was particularly curious about, mostly, the long term effects of building a park on top of an enormous garbage heap, both towards human health and the environment. He broke up his answer into two pieces for me: The benefit of having a new park, and secondly, since trash doesn’t disappear (the buried trash nor the trash New Yorkers are generating), the hidden effects that might still be affecting people using the park or the surrounding environment area. Regarding the first one, he thought the long-term effects are undoubtedly positive. He explained that the neighborhoods around Freshkills were plagued for years, not just by the overwhelming smell of a landfill that could be seen from space, but also by serious health effects. With Freshkills Park being built, one opens up huge recreational possibilities while transforming some deeply polluted areas. It’s having a big effect on natural populations.
But there’s still buried trash! What’s happening to it? The short answer is that it is very, very slowly degrading. By-products include methane gas (a huge contributor to climate change) and something called leachate, which is basically the nasty fluid that seeps out of trash heaps. Freshkills is technically advanced, so they actually capture the methane gas and use it to heat homes in the area. They also capture and clean the leachate, which is another positive. (stylistic device: Right-Branching Sentence) The big question here is whose health are we talking about. New Yorkers might be better off, but New York’s trash is still going somewhere. In fact, it is shipped as far away as South Carolina, and the waste management practices of many of the landfills that now get New York’s trash are pretty subpar. These landfills are often located where large numbers of people of color live, so there is still a substantial human health toll that is basically being shifted from New York to some other place. In a way, closing the landfill is a huge win for health, but without reducing waste production overall, the negative impacts still exist, whether it’s from the emissions generated through shipping the trash or in the communities where the trash ultimately winds up.
In his email, Jonathan Tarleton reminded me that Freshkills had such a massive stigma for decades that some of Staten Island’s residents are still very wary of the park. He states, “You would be hard-pressed to find someone who wishes they still had the landfill, but there are also many people who have not warmed to the park, especially if they had to live with the landfill for so many years.” The Freshkills Park Alliance has worked really hard to reach out to the community and try to bring people in to overcome that wariness. But I think that will be a long process. If you think about what the park brings, nicer environment, community space, and so on, those are things that increase the quality of life of the communities surrounding the park and the city as a whole. That can increase property values and make some people better off. So it’s turning out that there are quite a few other benefits from the park for the people of Staten Island.
After much research, it seems the solution to the trash crisis in our cities needs to be attacked from many different angles. New York City has been making strides over the years to improve its practices. It is currently creating a municipal compost system. It also opened a very impressive new facility to facilitate more recycling a couple of years ago. There are even proposals throughout the city for pneumatic trash systems. These use negative air pressure to pull solid waste from connected disposal points through a network of pipes to a central collection terminal. But several West Coast cities are the real superstars of waste management, specifically San Francisco. Not only do the people of San Francisco have heightened environmental awareness, but the city has spent the last decade instituting sweeping and strict rules about how its residents and businesses can discard items they no longer want. They have banned disposable plastic bags, and have made recycling and composting mandatory. Guillermo Rodriguez, policy director for San Francisco’s Department of the Environment, puts it best when he said “the reason our program is so successful is that reaching Zero Waste has really become one of the core values of San Francisco” (Clarke). Following San Francisco’s lead in changing a community’s attitude towards wastefulness and environmental health is truly the key to finally finding a solution to the world’s trash problem.
The history of Fresh Kills landfill on New York’s tiny Staten Island stresses our need to address the problem of trash. As the largest city in the world’s most wasteful country, The Big Apple serves as a striking illustration of our “throwaway culture.” The landfill generates over 50,000 tons of trash each day. In her essay Lippard explains, “Capitalism thrives on unsustainable growth and expansion while its byproducts, its waste, also grow and expand exponentially” (Lippard 142). This current disposable lifestyle is the biggest reason this problem persists. Secondly, as New York is the most densely populated city in the United States, and being small in size as far as land mass, the available land for the disposing of garbage is simply non-existent. For decades, the residents of Staten Island have felt like they’ve been treated like the city’s “forgotten borough.” As well as being saddled with the stigma of being dumped on, by receiving 100 percent of the four other boroughs’ residential garbage, Staten Island residents also endured decades of the unbearable stench in their neighborhoods. Most concerning to them though was the health hazards of inhaling (stylistic device: Strong Active Verbs) the emissions from the dump. Then of course, the environment at large, shouldered the devastating effects from the five tons of methane gas it emitted daily. Despite years of complaints, lawsuits and even a move to secede from the rest of New York City, the landfill managed to exist for over 50 years.
The politics and economics of transporting waste to other locations kept the problem alive much longer than reasonable. Finally, in March of 2001 the landfill was abruptly closed due to the election of three Republican politicians who owed their victories to the people of Staten Island. After the tangled bureaucratic history, it seemed that the nightmare was over and the healing could begin with a plan to transform the dump into a public park almost three times the size of Central Park (stylistic device: Periodic Sentence). This plan was briefly diverted when the landfill needed to reopen temporarily as sorting ground and then burial site for personal effects, and the human and architectural remains from Ground Zero. A memorial is planned for this portion of the upcoming community park.
The New York Sanitation and Parks and Recreation departments have committed to collaborate for decades to develop Freshkills Park. The mounds of trash are being capped with impermeable plastic and eight additional layers of barrier material to separate the ground we touch and walk on from the waste dump below. There will be extensive underground piping and drainage channels at work to capture and repurpose leachate, also known as “garbage juice,” and the damaging methane gas will be harvested on site to provide energy to 20,000 homes. The rehabilitated Fresh Kills will offer a human made wetland buffer for neighborhoods threatened by future storms. The new and improved Freshkills will be an open public space with paths and waterways accessible by canoe, kayak, foot, horseback, bike or car. It will have diverse wildlife refuges and research and educational facilities. Tree planting and other beautification efforts have been accelerated. Perhaps the park will serve as a symbolic re-payment, both emotional and environmental for the people of Staten Island.
FreshKills landfill always stood as an extreme example of the garbage problem in the world and, as a spokesperson for the New York Department of Parks and Recreation stated, as “a reminder of wastefulness, excess, and environmental neglect”(New York Department of Parks and Recreation spokesperson). (stylistic device: Use of Dialogue) But in her New York Times article, Lisa W. Foderaro paints a picture of the future plans to construct Freshkills Park, and how Freshkills landfill will go from a “dump to a paragon of ecology.” Foderaro explains, as befits what used to be the world’s largest landfill, the future of Freshkills could represent the planet’s greatest act of ecological payment. The really interesting thing about Freshkills Park from a design and implementation view-point is how long a process it will be to realize the vision of the park. The planned phases of implementation stretch out over decades, partly because of funding but also because of the developmental approach the designers and planners are taking. The park is primarily separated into 4 different sections, different mounds of trash, that were capped at different times and are now being retaken by nature and seeded and shaped by NYC Parks. There have been some small projects (sports fields and greenways) that have fully opened to the public, but the city is also allowing the public into the site for various public events throughout the year, including, kayaking, hiking, kite flying, and so on.
Wishing to learn more about the status of Freshkills Park today and New York’s trash problem, I decided to reach out to Jonathan Tarleton, Department of Urban Studies and planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There were a few things that I was particularly curious about, mostly, the long term effects of building a park on top of an enormous garbage heap, both towards human health and the environment. He broke up his answer into two pieces for me: The benefit of having a new park, and secondly, since trash doesn’t disappear (the buried trash nor the trash New Yorkers are generating), the hidden effects that might still be affecting people using the park or the surrounding environment area. Regarding the first one, he thought the long-term effects are undoubtedly positive. He explained that the neighborhoods around Freshkills were plagued for years, not just by the overwhelming smell of a landfill that could be seen from space, but also by serious health effects. With Freshkills Park being built, one opens up huge recreational possibilities while transforming some deeply polluted areas. It’s having a big effect on natural populations.
But there’s still buried trash! What’s happening to it? The short answer is that it is very, very slowly degrading. By-products include methane gas (a huge contributor to climate change) and something called leachate, which is basically the nasty fluid that seeps out of trash heaps. Freshkills is technically advanced, so they actually capture the methane gas and use it to heat homes in the area. They also capture and clean the leachate, which is another positive. (stylistic device: Right-Branching Sentence) The big question here is whose health are we talking about. New Yorkers might be better off, but New York’s trash is still going somewhere. In fact, it is shipped as far away as South Carolina, and the waste management practices of many of the landfills that now get New York’s trash are pretty subpar. These landfills are often located where large numbers of people of color live, so there is still a substantial human health toll that is basically being shifted from New York to some other place. In a way, closing the landfill is a huge win for health, but without reducing waste production overall, the negative impacts still exist, whether it’s from the emissions generated through shipping the trash or in the communities where the trash ultimately winds up.
In his email, Jonathan Tarleton reminded me that Freshkills had such a massive stigma for decades that some of Staten Island’s residents are still very wary of the park. He states, “You would be hard-pressed to find someone who wishes they still had the landfill, but there are also many people who have not warmed to the park, especially if they had to live with the landfill for so many years.” The Freshkills Park Alliance has worked really hard to reach out to the community and try to bring people in to overcome that wariness. But I think that will be a long process. If you think about what the park brings, nicer environment, community space, and so on, those are things that increase the quality of life of the communities surrounding the park and the city as a whole. That can increase property values and make some people better off. So it’s turning out that there are quite a few other benefits from the park for the people of Staten Island.
After much research, it seems the solution to the trash crisis in our cities needs to be attacked from many different angles. New York City has been making strides over the years to improve its practices. It is currently creating a municipal compost system. It also opened a very impressive new facility to facilitate more recycling a couple of years ago. There are even proposals throughout the city for pneumatic trash systems. These use negative air pressure to pull solid waste from connected disposal points through a network of pipes to a central collection terminal. But several West Coast cities are the real superstars of waste management, specifically San Francisco. Not only do the people of San Francisco have heightened environmental awareness, but the city has spent the last decade instituting sweeping and strict rules about how its residents and businesses can discard items they no longer want. They have banned disposable plastic bags, and have made recycling and composting mandatory. Guillermo Rodriguez, policy director for San Francisco’s Department of the Environment, puts it best when he said “the reason our program is so successful is that reaching Zero Waste has really become one of the core values of San Francisco” (Clarke). Following San Francisco’s lead in changing a community’s attitude towards wastefulness and environmental health is truly the key to finally finding a solution to the world’s trash problem.
Works Cited
Foderaro, Lisa W. “From Dump to Paragon of Ecology: A First Peek.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 29 Sept. 2011. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.
Hu, Winnie. “New York's Growth Can Be Measured in Trash Bags.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 6 Feb. 2017. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.
Iannucci, Lisa “New York City's Recycling Programs - Where Does the Garbage Go?” The New York Cooperator , The Co-op & Condo Monthly. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.
Lippard, Lucy. “Trash in the City.” Non-Stop Metropolis New York City Atlas eds. Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly Schapiro. Oakland: Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplain Fund, 2016. 142-144. Print.
O’Connell, Frank, and Ascher, Kate. “From Garbage to Energy at Fresh Kills.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 14 Sept. 2013. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.
Spertus, Juliette. “Pneumatic Tubes for One New York’s Trash.” Urban Omnibus. N.p., 9 Mar. 2016. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.
Tarleton, Jonathan. “Dispatches from the Blitz: On the Trail of Biodiversity.” Urban Omnibus. N.p., 13 May 2016. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.
Foderaro, Lisa W. “From Dump to Paragon of Ecology: A First Peek.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 29 Sept. 2011. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.
Hu, Winnie. “New York's Growth Can Be Measured in Trash Bags.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 6 Feb. 2017. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.
Iannucci, Lisa “New York City's Recycling Programs - Where Does the Garbage Go?” The New York Cooperator , The Co-op & Condo Monthly. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.
Lippard, Lucy. “Trash in the City.” Non-Stop Metropolis New York City Atlas eds. Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly Schapiro. Oakland: Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplain Fund, 2016. 142-144. Print.
O’Connell, Frank, and Ascher, Kate. “From Garbage to Energy at Fresh Kills.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 14 Sept. 2013. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.
Spertus, Juliette. “Pneumatic Tubes for One New York’s Trash.” Urban Omnibus. N.p., 9 Mar. 2016. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.
Tarleton, Jonathan. “Dispatches from the Blitz: On the Trail of Biodiversity.” Urban Omnibus. N.p., 13 May 2016. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.