Freshkills Park Blog

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.

Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) has recently added a $1 fine for having more than 10% of a household’s trash composed of food waste. Passed on January 1, 2015, this comes as the next step in Seattle’s attempt to remove compostable materials from ending up in landfills, following the city’s previous 2005 ban on recyclable materials under a similar $1 fine program and the encouragement of residents to compost via SPU-provided compost bins.

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.

Well known to city dwellers, the urban landscape is dominated by impervious hard surfaces that require manmade sewage infrastructure to handle all rainfall and storm water management. In normally functioning environments, soil and vegetation absorbs this water and retains it to a certain capacity before runoff is generated.

Late last month, Freshkills Park held a workshop at NYC’s Green Horizons Conference for Middle School students. Students and volunteers gathered on what began as a rainy, blustery day in nature to learn about different careers in Natural Resources and the Environment at Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden.

The massive transformation of what was once the world’s largest landfill into a 2,200-acre New York City Park is unique in many ways, but fits a typology of regenerative landscape design that has become a more common practice in response to shifts in global urbanization.

Million Trees NYC has recently seeded a four acre portion of North Park to provide vegetative support for the trees that will be planted in the spring. This newest joint project will plant 8,000 trees and restored over four acres with native plants.

Last week, the Freshkills Park Team had the pleasure of meeting with a group of city officials and their consultants from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Addis Ababa’s Repi Solid Waste Disposal Site, a 40 year old open dump, has recently been closed and the City has installed a methane capture and flaring system.