Freshkills Park Blog

TED talks are the best.  Here’s a video of Saul Griffith from Makani Power talking about the giant kites he’s been working on.  Kites with wind turbines mounted on them. These ‘kite turbines’ harness energy from high-altitude wind currents and send it earthward through cables. 

From Brazil comes this gorgeous new “eco-park” built on a brownfield–formerly the 130,000-square-foot site of a garbage incinerator.  Davis Brody Bond Architects and Levisky Arquitetos Associados have transformed it into a multi-functional park that celebrates the site’s industrial, cultural and natural heritage. 

New Yorkers are throwing less stuff away now than they were three years ago. That’s according to Steve Cohen on his blog at The Observer.  Apparently, we’re down to 51,250 tons per week, from 54,205 tons per week in 2005. 

We’re happy to begin our third year of public bus tours through the Freshkills Park site. Tours run from April through the middle of November on alternating Saturdays at 10 a.m and 1 p.m, and we’d love for you to come out on a tour. 

The Growing and Greening New York exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York continues on until April 22nd (Earth Day).  If you’re interested in the conversation about how New York City needs to adapt for a more sustainable future, you’ll want to check out the show. 

With the 8th anniversary of the closure of Fresh Kills Landfill coming up, the Staten Island Advance’s blog, The Staten Island Notebook, published this story reviewing the steps preceding the landfill’s closure.  The story singles out one man, former Fresh Kills crane operator John Leverock, as a possible progenitor of the idea to close Fresh Kills and to containerize and export the city’s waste, as the current Solid Waste Management Plan prescribes. 

In January, Forgotten NY took a tour of the St. George Theater and some of the gorgeous old houses in St. George, the neighborhood hugging the ferry terminal in Staten Island.  SI-based artist and author Cynthia Von Buhler (who, with her husband Russell Farhang, compile our favorite Staten Island blog, The Prodigal Borough) helped lead the tour and gave a guided tour of their own incredible home. 

Despite its simplicity, sustainability is a concept people have a hard time wrapping their minds around. To help, Michael D. Lemonick for Scientific American Earth 3.0 has consulted with several experts on the topic to find out what kinds of misconceptions they most often encounter.

Will the trash and recycling slump in China impact recycling programs here in the West? The New York Times looks at the failing recycling industry in China and the ripple effects felt here at home.

The slide show accompanying the story is also pretty illustrative.

This is pretty inspiring: Ohio Valley Creative Energy (OVCE) is trying to build art studios for glass, ceramics and metal work, powered by landfill gas.  They’re focused on public education about sustainability through artwork and big-idea design, and they worked with a group of art students from Meyzeek Middle school in Louisville, KY to create this stop-motion animated video demonstrating how methane gas can be used as a renewable energy source for use by arts facilities.

When Fresh Kills Landfill closed, the Department of Sanitation began exporting the city’s garbage to private landfills. The long-haul trucking required for that export has been costly: waste disposal rose from 40 to 100 dollars per ton and has contributed to congestion and air pollution.

In 2001 the Snug Harbor Cultural Center’s Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art launched an exhibition as a response to the closure of the Fresh Kills Landfill.  19 artists and artist-teams responded with “Fresh Kills: Artists Respond to the Closure of the Staten Island Landfill,” a collection of paintings, sculpture, photographs, videos and conceptual works, some of which are directly about Fresh Kills while others deal more generally about environmental issues.

In the early 1980s, Cairo was experiencing the developmental crunch of growing population and limited civic resources.  A 1984 study found the green space per capita in Cairo to be roughly equivalent to a human footprint.  In the mid ’90s, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture began construction on Al-Azhar Park on the derelict Darassa site, a 500-year-old, 74-acre mound of rubble located in the heart of the city.

Please join us for a talk on the history of landfill operations at the former Fresh Kills Landfill.  Dennis Diggins, Deputy Director, Bureau of Waste Disposal at NYC Department of Sanitation, will discuss the history of waste management at New York City’s former landfill. 

More details about Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to tax plastic bags and the revenue the tax will generate.  Independent of revenue, this seems like an easy issue to assume environmental righteousness about, but as New York Times City Room blogger Jennifer Lee points out:

Some have noted that environmental equation on reusable versus disposable bags is not so clear-cut.

Meirle Laderman Ukeles is a Percent For Art Artist whose work will be integrated in the development of Freshkills Park. She has been the Artist-in-Residence at the NYC Department of Sanitation since 1977 and, following the ideals of her 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art, has executed numerous maintenance and sanitation-related artistic projects over the last 30 years. 

Urban Omnibus is an online project of the Architectural League that explores the relationship between design and New York City’s physical environment: revealing the choices shaping the city, encouraging conversation, inspiring innovation.

If you’re interested in the factors shaping Freshkills Park, you might be interested in checking out some of the stories this new publication is covering.

As regular travelers on the R train to South Ferry, we’re excited about the new South Ferry 1 train terminus (which connects to the R-W station) and the artwork that will be on display there.

A story for the environmental engineer in all of us: are landfills better capped with clay, or soil and plants? It’s actually a hot debate.

Freshkills Park and landscape architect James Corner, principal of Field Operations, have been featured in a huge story in the current issue of New York Magazine. We’re happy to get this kind of exposure, though the story does seem to incorrectly suggest that when you visit the site you see a heap of trash.