Last year’s winning project for HUD’s Rebuild by Design competition, New Meadowlands, will be making its first steps toward fruition. In April, the State of New Jersey announced a request for proposals from civil engineering and hydrology firms for a feasibility study, environmental impact statement, professional engineering design, and construction administration services.

2,200 total acres. 990 acres of former landfill. Last garbage barge in 2001. 150 million tons of garbage. Located along the Arthur Kill, Great Fresh Kill, Richmond Creek and Main Creek.

No, it didn’t matter how many facts I tried to memorize in preparation for my internship with Freshkills Park, because nothing can really prepare you for your first site visit.

Most visitors to Freshkills Park usually get excited when they see the ospreys in their nest, or a bald eagle fly by, or a red-tailed hawk overhead… but scientists and bird enthusiasts are most excited about all of the grasslands within the park.

At around 95% air, Expanded Polystyrene foam (EPS) is incredibly buoyant, which is why it was used by the U.S. Coast Guard to build a six-person life raft in 1942.

EPS, commonly known as Styrofoam, has since floated into everyday life, with people using billions of foam cups, bowls, plates, takeout containers, trays, and packing peanuts every year.

Over the past several decades, there has been a steady decline – paired with an increased consolidation – of landfills within the United States. This is due, in part, to a number of federal legislation that revised and updated the operational practices and permitted locations of municipal waste disposal.

This year, more than 900 people applied for a position with New York City’s Parks Fellowship & Conservation Corps. The increasingly popular program is a 40-week public service commitment in which individuals are assigned to divisions throughout the agency to help protect and enhance New York City’s parks and natural resources.

On June 7^th, Freshkills Park will open its gates for Discovery Day. The event is a chance to spend the afternoon exploring the trails, kayaking in the waterways, and experiencing the panoramic views that the Park has to offer.

As Freshkills Park’s programming season is getting underway, so is its volunteer program. From an informational meeting in March to the park’s upcoming Discovery Day, things are just heating up!

March 19th marked Freshkills Park’s first Volunteer Informational meeting at the College of Staten Island.

What is recyclable and what is trash? This is a question recycling utility owners find themselves asking more and more often. While it is common practice to recycle plastic soda bottles, detergent containers, and grocery bags, recently recycling facilities are having a tougher time determining what is worth recycling.

If you haven’t yet visited Paula Hayes’ Gazing Globes at Madison Square Park, I highly recommend a trip to 25th street around dusk before the exhibition closes on April 19th. Hayes’ first public art exhibition in NYC comes alive as the sun starts to set over the city.

Distant cousins of the Titanic are lying offshore just south of Freshkills Park’s West Mound. According to some, the Arthur Kill Ship Graveyard is an historical and haunted maritime marvel, ranking among the top ten of boat graveyards and separately, of out-of-the-way NYC curiosities.

Here at Freshkills Park, we’re fans of trees. I mean, we’re a park, how could we not be? This year, the NYC Parks Department is conducting its decennial street tree census, TreesCount, and we’re teaming up to count a bunch of street trees outside of the park.

Bricks are one of the oldest and most commonly used materials for building on the planet, and until the early 20th century , the most commonly used building material in the United States. The simplicity of bricks is that they are small, which makes them easy to handle during the construction process and capable of forming very large and complex aggregate shapes.

Every January, many cities are stuck dealing with an influx of Christmas trees after they’ve been removed from cozy homes and cast into the city’s waste management system. While Christmas trees may often be left out for landfill dumping, some municipalities and environmentalists have come up with ways to recycle them, keeping trees out of the waste stream.

A few weeks ago, my iPhone 4s slowly started to malfunction. When the battery started to die within hours of being unplugged, I thought, ‘easy fix… it needs a new battery.’ Then one day I tried to make a call but no one could hear me.

In mid-December, the Freshkills Park Development Team took a trip to visit the Black Rock Forest Consortium in Cornwall, NY. The Consortium manages 3,838 acres of forest with a scientific research field station on site. The team met with Dr. Bill Schuster, Black Rock’s Executive Director, who gave an overview of the facilities at the station and the research and scientific programming taking place, and led the team on a tour into the forest to visit some of the current research sites towards fostering ideas for the future of the scientific research program at Freshkills Park.

Street lighting adds urban character and keeps our streets safe. However, the environmental and economic impacts are remarkable and cost some cities millions of dollars per year to keep street lights on. To avoid drastically restructuring a municipality’s energy-producing infrastructure, innovative designs are under development across the globe to illuminate roadways and walkways, and achieve more efficient traffic flow.

One bright and sunny Saturday last month, volunteers from various parts of Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Manhattan came together to weed, rake, and restore plantings around Freshkills Park’s own Schmul Park in the Travis neighborhood.

Schmul Park was once an unimproved cement lot and scuffy playground on Freshkills Park’s northwest side.

Located just a short drive outside of Beijing is a new city in development. Tianjin is one example of the several planned Eco-cities in China, where sustainable cities have become a relatively popular urban planning typology for formerly polluted areas. In the case of Tianjin, the one square mile reservoir was used to store a brine water solution containing Mercury and DDT, which damaged the area’s ecological functions.

“I see green as far as I can see,” a third grader said as he stood on top of North Mound. One of the 495 students who visited Freshkills Park this fall, this child readily grasped the mission of the park: to turn what once was the world’s largest landfill into one of the largest green areas in New York City.