The long tradition of garbage to green
Clockwise, from top left: Freshkills Park, Pulau Semakau, Bukit Tagar, Freshkills Park
We’re often asked whether there are other landfills in the world that have been turned into parks and natural areas. There are, in fact, a lot of them, including many hundreds to thousands of unofficial dump sites and historic landfills whose operation preceded any type of government regulation (Flushing Meadows, we’re looking at you). Today, reclaiming landfill sites for recreational use and nature preserves is a popular and out-of-the-closet method of turning ecological liabilities into assets for their surrounding communities. WebEcoist has posted ten great examples of contemporary projects from around the world, including Freshkills Park. The variation in methods and ambitions between different international projects is interesting.
In planning and designing Freshkills Park, teams of planners, designers, and engineers have researched numerous landfill-to-park reclamation projects in order to identify which methods have worked well in the past and to mitigate potential hazards.
