Tags: landfills

The Freshkills Park Talks lecture series continues on Tuesday with John McLaughlin, Director of Ecological Services for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).  John designed and oversees the ecological reclamation of the Pennsylvania and Fountain Avenue landfills, sited along Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn. 

In 2002, a year after the Department of Sanitation and and the Municipal Arts Society announced the design competition for the reuse of the Fresh Kills landfill, the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) embarked on an investigative project called Garbage Problems aimed at understanding the processes behind waste management in New York City. 

Philosophy in the Land II, an exhibition featuring photography, drawings and prints by artist Agnes Denes spanning the last 50 years, is on view at the Leslie Tonkonow Gallery in Manhattan until January 16th.  Denes is a pioneer of the environmental art movment whose ecological and philosophical interests surfaced in her 1968 piece Rice/Tree/Burial, which has been described as “the first site-specific piece anywhere with ecological concerns.”

City planners in Guelph, Ontario have approved a master plan to transform a 200-acre decommissioned landfill into the world’s largest pollinator park.  The former Eastview Road Landfill, which operated as a municipal dump from 1961 to 2003, has been capped and outfitted with a methane capturing system that converts landfill gas into usable energy. 

Eli Cohen gave a terrific talk Monday night on his work, as director of Ayala Water and Ecology, using plants to remove pollutants and contaminants from water, soil and air.  We’re grateful to the huge crowd that poured into the Arsenal gallery for the event, to Laura Starr and Yamit Perez for putting us in touch with Eli and, of course, to Eli himself for sharing his work and his thoughts.

Semakau Landfill, the world’s first offshore landfill and Singapore’s only waste destination, has been described by Singapore’s government as “Scenic Waste Disposal.”  The site has been open to the public for recreational activities since 2005 and has been envisioned as an eco-park featuring renewable energy generation and educational facilities. 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjCjWVY3MOw&w=507]

Partners Waste Management and Linde Group have begun processing fuel at the world’s largest Landfill Gas (LFG) to Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) plant, located at Altamont Landfill near Livermore, CA.  Waste Management–the leading US waste services company and largest national operator of refuse and recycling trucks–collects the garbage, and Linde, an engineering company, purifies and liquifies the LFG produced by the waste. 

Since the closure of Fresh Kills Landfill in 2001, districts outside of New York City, and as far as Virginia and Ohio, have become destinations for the city’s garbage.  Just north of Philadelphia, a 6,000-acre complex of Bucks County landfills–in Tullytown, Falls Township and Morrisville, PA–receive about 2,500 tons of New York City’s trash each day. 

The New York Times surveys the growth of “zero waste” strategies in the US among private companies, institutions and entire municipalities.  “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle” are really coming of age: biodegradable utensils, large-scale composting and citywide, warehouse-like free swap shops.  And it’s not just hippies and treehuggers participating anymore.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has identified nearly 4,100 contaminated sites nationally, including abandoned mines, disused factories and some landfills, that could be suitable for renewable energy projects–primarily solar and wind power, and some biomass harvesting.  Contaminated sites are considered particularly appealing for renewable energy projects because they are less likely than other sites to be prized for their habitat value.

Veru-Tek Technologies has developed a spin on phytoremediation to clean up contaminated soil and groundwater on brownfield sites.  Where traditional phytoremediation uses in situ plants, Veru-Tek uses extracts derived from plants, nanometals produced from plant extracts, and other natural substances to dissolve and oxidize contaminants (like coal tar, chemical solvents and petroleum byproducts) in place, turning them into non-toxic compounds. 

Catalyx Nanotech is the first company to use methane for nanofiber production. Through a demonstration project at a California landfill, the company was able to split methane into pure hydrogen and carbon to produce nanofibers.  Carbon-based nanofibers can be applied to a number of  uses: medical, energy, protection, textile; in this case, they’ll be used for hydrogren fuel supply. 

The New York Times chronicles developments at the Pennsylvania Avenue and Fountain Avenue Landfills in Brooklyn.  New York City”s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has completed the first phase of ecological rehabilitation of the site, which began in 2004.  After the landfill capping procedure was complete, DEP seeded the 400-acre area and planted shrubs and trees into a landscape of ecological islands. 

The New York Times features Dan Phillips and his construction company, Phoenix Commotion, which builds housing for low-income families out of discarded materials that would otherwise be sent to landfills.

So far, he has built 14 homes in Huntsville, which is his hometown, on lots either purchased or received as a donation.

Plastic bags are an environmental bane: they take a really, really long time to decompose in landfills, they’re the largest pollutant in the world’s oceans, and the general the accumulation of plastics is “one of the most ubiquitous and long-lasting recent changes to the surface of our planet.”

Among Treehugger’s 10 greenest colleges in the US is the University of New Hampshire (UNH), the first college in the country to run primarily on landfill gas.  85% of electricity and gas needs on the 5 million square foot campus are met by methane produced at a private, nearby landfill operated by Waste Management and piped to the school from a cogeneration plant. 

UK supermarket chain Tesco is taking action to reduce methane emissions from landfills by diverting 100% of its food waste from landfill disposal.  Among other new practices, the company will send the 5,000 tons of post-date meat left over each year by its 2,315 grocery stores and distribution centers to produce electricity–enough to power some 6,000 homes–through biogas harvest.  

We recently discovered that our neighbors at the New Jersey Meadowlands keep a nature blog full of amazing photos of the bird and insect life that lives within its 8,400 acres of wetlands and open space.  Lots of these photos have been taken at the 110-acre Richard W.

It’s increasingly rare to come across new, untouched land for park development in cities. In the May issue of Landscape Architecture, Peter Harnik explains how “squeezing innovative green spaces into crowded cities requires looking for land in unexpected places.”  He outlines the potential of a variety of urban spaces to function as parkland: cemeteries, school yards, rooftops, community gardens, reservoir lands, stormwater channels, closed streets and reclaimed parking areas.  

The Hiriya landfill in Tel Aviv, a 2,000-acre site adjacent to the city’s airport, has a lot in common with the Freshkills Park site.  From 1952 to 1999, the landfill was Israel’s largest garbage disposal site, at one point receiving one third of the country’s waste.