7 ms·

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

77 points by mcone 6y ago

wrkronmiller 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
- hinkley 6y 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.
  - pottertheotter 6y 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.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      From what I understand you have a synthetic barrier, several feet of clay above it (which holds water but doesn't pass it very fast), then a layer of loose aggregate above it, and soil above that. Gravel over an impervious layer is, for all intents and purposes, a drain. Unless the slopes are all wrong so the water pools in the middle.
    - shum1 6y ago
      I found some videos on youtube that give a more visual explanation of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwNWjBxGadA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwNWjBxGadA
      - hinkley 6y ago
        It's worth noting that the business model for this group is to treat a landfill a little differently to boost methane production. But in the end they're still keeping the leachate on site, and some of the water escapes as vapor (they dewater the methane before burning it).
gumby 6y 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!
- pottertheotter 6y 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoreline_Amphitheatre
- colechristensen 6y ago
  oh, i think this explains why i think mountain view smells bad, i thought it was just the bay
DrAwdeOccarim 6y 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_11,_2001_and_aftermath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresh_Kills_Landfill#September... Boy I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder...
- jasonv 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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)
    - dmix 6y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTxw5nQX7SA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTxw5nQX7SA
  - taneq 6y ago
    > I get the magnitude of 9/11 Equivalent to the last three days of COVID-19 deaths?
BrianB 6y 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 6y ago
>covers up rotting pile/hole/toxic waste nature is healing!
TedShiller 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Ozzie_osman 6y ago
  It also doesn't even look pretty in the pictures.
- 6y ago
aaron695 6y 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.
- jacoblambda 6y 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.
  - aaron695 6y 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.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      That makes no sense. It's cheaper to declare an area to not be settled by humans than to destroy it and then declare the area to not be settled.
      - aaron695 6y ago
        But they don't do they? Environmentalist doomed us to global warming from religious fear of nuclear energy, yet the one main accident created - "the area is essentially one of Europe's largest nature preserves." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone
01100011 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
  - 01100011 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
Shiny happy plastic everywhere https://youtu.be/-dk3NOEgX7o https://youtu.be/-dk3NOEgX7o
awiesenhofer 6y 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 6y 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.

77 points by mcone 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
hinkley 6y 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.
- pottertheotter 6y 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.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    From what I understand you have a synthetic barrier, several feet of clay above it (which holds water but doesn't pass it very fast), then a layer of loose aggregate above it, and soil above that. Gravel over an impervious layer is, for all intents and purposes, a drain. Unless the slopes are all wrong so the water pools in the middle.
  - shum1 6y ago
    I found some videos on youtube that give a more visual explanation of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwNWjBxGadA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwNWjBxGadA
    - hinkley 6y ago
      It's worth noting that the business model for this group is to treat a landfill a little differently to boost methane production. But in the end they're still keeping the leachate on site, and some of the water escapes as vapor (they dewater the methane before burning it).

gumby 6y 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!

pottertheotter 6y 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoreline_Amphitheatre
colechristensen 6y ago
oh, i think this explains why i think mountain view smells bad, i thought it was just the bay

DrAwdeOccarim 6y 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_11,_2001_and_aftermath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresh_Kills_Landfill#September... Boy I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder...

jasonv 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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)
  - dmix 6y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTxw5nQX7SA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTxw5nQX7SA
- taneq 6y ago
  > I get the magnitude of 9/11 Equivalent to the last three days of COVID-19 deaths?

BrianB 6y 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 6y ago

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

TedShiller 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Ozzie_osman 6y ago
It also doesn't even look pretty in the pictures.
6y ago

aaron695 6y 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.

jacoblambda 6y 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.
- aaron695 6y 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.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    That makes no sense. It's cheaper to declare an area to not be settled by humans than to destroy it and then declare the area to not be settled.
    - aaron695 6y ago
      But they don't do they? Environmentalist doomed us to global warming from religious fear of nuclear energy, yet the one main accident created - "the area is essentially one of Europe's largest nature preserves." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone

01100011 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
- 01100011 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago

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

awiesenhofer 6y 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 6y 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.