Progress at Brookfield, Staten Island’s other landfill
Progress continues at Staten Island’s Brookfield Avenue Landfill, a 132-acre site in the Great Kills neighborhood, just east of the Freshkills Park site. The second phase of construction is under way and should be complete by 2013. As with other landfill remediation projects in New York City, the city Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) will oversee completion of the cap, barrier walls and leachate collection system. Once that infrastructure is in place, DEP’s John McLaughlin will manage the ecological restoration of the site, which includes the planting of 25,000 native trees and shrubs. The site will eventually be turned into public parkland.
A few years back McLaughlin discussed a similar project at Brooklyn’s Penn and Fountain Landfills as part of our Freshkills Park Talk lecture series. It’s worth noting that the Fresh Kills Landfill differs from the Brookfield Avenue and Penn and Fountain Landfills in that it does not require remediation, since most of the waste received at the Fresh Kills was municipal solid waste.
