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New York Turned The World’s Largest Garbage Dump Into A Green Oasis of Native Grasses That Also Powers Homes
Staten Island's Freshkills Park is about to open after Fresh Kills, the world's largest landfill, closed down in 2001.
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After the world’s largest landfill closed down, New York State officials and nonprofits facilitated a decades-long transition from dump to green outdoors space.
Creating a park three times the size of Central Park? That’s not so easy. The conversion has involved goats, using landfill fumes to methane-power homes, and plenty of manpower as buried trash gets turned into rolling hills of native grass.
Fresh Kills landfill, once the dumping site for all of New York City’s garbage, was a place that once terrorized Staten Islanders with odors and the sight of trash mounds said to have reached 20 stories high.
Now it’s just months away from reopening as one of the world’s great rewilding projects in the boundaries of one of the most densely populated areas in the Western Hemisphere.
Originally promised as a park by former mayor Michael Bloomberg during a dip in the polls, the dump closed in 2001, allowing sanitation department officials to begin work to control the pollution.