Some of Staten Island’s tallest hills are made of household rubbish, and there are four of them.
That land was tidal creek and salt marsh until 1948, when the city opened a landfill on it as a temporary measure. By 1955 the site was the largest landfill in the world. New York City Parks puts the peak in 1986 and 1987, when Fresh Kills took in as much as 29,000 tons of waste a day and employed 680 people. Waste Today put the final tally at 53 years of operation and 150 million tons of solid waste when the last barge came in on 22 March 2001.
Sealing the mounds
Under the meadows sits a layered sandwich of soil and plastic. Each mound carries an engineered cap: a graded soil base, a gas venting layer, an impermeable liner, a drainage layer, then at least two feet of protective soil and six inches of planting soil on top. Sandy loam, seeded. Roots are doing structural work up there, holding the cover against erosion.
Decomposing waste also produces methane, and most of it gets sold rather than burned off. Freshkills Park’s engineering pages record about 3 million cubic feet of landfill gas collected per day as of 2018, purified down to roughly 1.5 million cubic feet of methane and sold to National Grid for cooking and heating on Staten Island. Production falls as the buried organic material runs out. The sanitation department has been preparing to shut the collection system down once monitoring data convinces state regulators the system is no longer needed.
Six months after the last barge
Fresh Kills reopened…