Freshkills Park Blog

Spring is in the air. At Freshkills Park that usually means the beginning of spring field trips and tours, but because we are social distancing, we’re bringing some of our favorite projects to you at home. Earlier this week Ariel from The Little Mermaid inspired us to decorate with things she scavenged.  

Freshkills Park, once the world’s largest landfill, has been reclaimed and transformed into native grasslands.  Landfills are not a sustainable technique for managing our waste and we need to explore alternatives for reducing our household waste streams to minimize and eventually eliminate the need for them.  

Picture this: You’re finishing up a carton of milk. You pour out the last drop and rinse it out. Then, you walk over to your home recycling station to decide where the carton should go. Trash? Paper and cardboard? Glass, metal, and plastic?

In our Freshkills Freshflix review of WALL-E, we learned that the average American throws out about 5 pounds of garbage a day. Much of that garbage could be recycled. New Yorkers recycle about 17% of our waste, less than half of possible material.

Unless you grew up near a landfill, like Fresh Kills, the average person doesn’t think twice about their trash once it’s picked up. However, all trash still has to go somewhere, and most of it isn’t designed to break down for hundreds of years.

This year, America reflects on the centennial anniversary of the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote. New York State is the birthplace of the formal women’s rights movement and many prominent suffragettes. Recently, in recognition of the need to celebrate these women and more generally, to erect more statutes honoring women, New York City is designing and installing statutes of prominent women.

North Park Phase 1 has a new completion date.  Construction slowed over the last year as the contractor worked to find sources of fill material that meet the stringent standards established for the new park by the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation.

As demand for plastic is on the rise and recycling efforts can only repurpose about 9% of generated plastic, scientists, engineers and producers are looking for green solutions to our petroleum plastic dependency.  While bioplastics have been around for about 100 years, there has been a recent surge of interest in them. 

Rachel Aronson is the Education Programming Coordinator for Freshkills Park. She loves spending time with kids and being outside, and she is passionate about improving access to parks in urban spaces. Rachel has worked as a classroom teacher, environmental educator, and manager of the Hazon Seal of Sustainability, a sustainability program for organizations.

Cell phones are an everyday item and an almost unavoidable necessity in our society.   In 2018, it was estimated 1.5 billion phones were produced with more cell phones active than people on the planet. Unfortunately, our increasing reliance on cell phones poses a number of environmental and social problems. 

Recycling gives some plastics a second or third life but ultimately recycling just delays the inevitable: all plastic is destined for the landfill.  While recycling systems have been developed for plastics that are commonly used and easily broken down, typically #1 and #2, technical and economic factors as well as smaller volumes have prevented recycling of other plastics such as #3 and #7.

With all the talk about recycling, do you know what those numbers on your plastic containers mean? Recycling is a great way to reduce demand for plastics, but it’s not as simple as putting your bottles in a blue bin. Different kinds of plastics are created for different purposes, and post-consumer plastics need to be managed in different ways.

Over the years of Freshkills Park’s transformation from landfill to park, its name has taken on a variety of meanings. Though some still associate “fresh kills” with the former landfill, many have begun to recognize its significance as a symbol of renewal, rebirth, and rejuvenation.

It is an exciting time for landfill-to-park projects in New York City. In addition to Freshkills Park’s forthcoming North Park Phase One development, the city saw its largest state park to date open in July on top of two former landfills.

As Freshkills Park undergoes its long transformation from landfill to public greenspace, access remains limited and it can be challenging to convey to the public all of the things going on inside the park’s boundaries. The Freshkills Park Development team has created an interactive map to serve as a virtual tour of the park project.

It’s resolution season again, and popular resolutions include eating better and to save money.  Eating greener is a great opportunity to meet your needs, reduce environmental impact and save money.

1. Use reusable bags when shopping

A greener diet starts at the store.  

Dear Freshkills Park Supporter:

We hope your time with the Park this year was inspiring, enlightening, and fun. While the site is currently closed to the public, the Alliance offered over 6,000 visitors the opportunity to experience the Park through arts and science activities, hikes and tours, education programs and recreation events.

Karl Vetter is the Project Development Coordinator for Freshkills Park.  A native of the Bronx, he has been highly involved in urban greenspaces as a Central Park volunteer, an intern in a Hydroponic greenhouse in Newark, an Americorps Coordinator with the New York Restoration Project, and a seasonal staff member of Partnerships for Parks.

It was yet another busy fall at Freshkills Park this year, with a number of park developments, programs, and events serving as a reminder of the radical transformation that continues to occur at what was once the world’s largest landfill.

Discovery Day

On September 15^th, over one thousand visitors flocked to Freshkills for its annual Discovery Day, in which several hundred acres were open for hands-on arts and STEM activities, kite-flying, biking, and free exploration.

Since its inception, the Freshkills Park team has fostered partnerships with artists from a variety of disciplines in an effort to document this preliminary phase of park development through creative expression. Over time, a number of works have emerged, ranging from ink studies produced within the confines of an old shipping container to bound notebooks created from the park’s ubiquitous invasive Phragmites plant.