Fresh Kills

Redeveloping one of the biggest landfills in the world The closure of New York City’s major landfill site is prompting new methods of dealing with the city’s waste, along with ambitious redevelopment plans that will eventually result in a new world-class multipurpose urban park For half a century the 2200 acre (8.9km2) Fresh Kills landfill took care of New York City’s prodigious output of solid waste, which today has reached a volume of about 50,000 tons (45,360 metric tonnes) a day: half construction debris, the balance evenly spilt between municipal and commercial waste. As the city’s other smaller landfills were phased out and incinerators closed for failing to meet federal air emissions standards, the city of 8.3 million looked to Fresh Kills to take in more and more. After the last other major landfill was closed — Fountain Ave in Brooklyn, in the mid-1980s — Fresh Kills was absorbing 90% of the city’s solid waste. As concern mounted over how quickly Fresh Kills’ capacity was being filled, the city raised the rates charged to private haulers handling the 12,000 tons (10,890 metric tonnes) a day of wastes generated by restaurants and businesses. As a result, virtually all this commercial waste was soon diverted to out-of-state landfills, hauled by truck. FreshKills continued to receive the lion’s share of NYC’s municipal waste for another 15 years, until a political decision was made in 1997 that this was an unfair burden to a single borough, Staten Island, where discontent over the issue had long simmered. ‘It was a gutsy decision because it forced us to develop a long-term export programme,’ recalls Vito Turso, Sanitation Department deputy commission for public information. The decision was made by mayor Rudy Giuliani, now a Republican Presidential hopeful. With appropriate management Fresh Kills had another 20 years capacity in it, Turso notes. But the political landscape was changing. In the late sixties New York politicians, such as writers Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin, had been promoting the idea of New York City breaking off from the rest of the Empire State to become the country’s 51st state. And ever since then increasingly vocal opposition from Staten Island included talk of seceding from the city so that it could levy taxes on the rest of NYC for taking in its waste. This helped to force Giuliani’s hand. ‘It was truly the mouse that roared,’ says Turso, about Staten Island, the least populous of the city’s five boroughs, now roughly 450,000 residents. The site was officially closed on 22 March 2001. After several decades of noise, obnoxious odours, and the trying company of thousands of opportunistic seagulls dining on fresh waste, the long suffering communities near Fresh Kills are in for a major silver lining — a new world-class park, two and a half times the size of the city’s grand CentralPark. The new 12km2 park, is still in the chrysalis phase, and is being unfurled gradually over the next 30 years. But already it has generated new enthusiasm for the area, including new housing development projects adjacent to the park that would not have sprouted if it were still an active landfill. Indeed, Staten Island’s South Shore is one of the city’s fastest growing communities. With the park, which is approximately 11% of Staten Island’s total land area, nearly 30% of the borough remains open space. A bit of history Fresh Kills was created by New York’s master builder Robert Moses in 1948, originally at almost 3000 acres (12.14km2), but over the years portions were relinquished for parks and other public uses. It would eventually become the largest refuse heap in human history, fed by twenty barges, each carrying 650 tons (590 metric tonnes) of waste, unloaded there every day. The name Fresh Kills refers to its location along the banks of the Fresh Kills estuary. The estuary takes its name from the Middle Dutch word kille, which means riverbed or water channel, which was fed by fresh water springs and streams. This part of the New World has many place names that can be traced to Middle Dutch, reflecting extensive early Dutch settlement. Located as far out of sight as possible for most of the city — at the southern end of Staten Island — Fresh Kills was situated on what used to be known, pejoratively, as swampland, but is nowadays more gratefully referred to as wetlands. As a result, never more than 45% of the Fresh Kills area was ever actually used for dumping waste. This was concentrated in four large mounds, which now reach close to 200 feet (61metres) high; at their peaks they were 25metres taller than the nearby Statue of Liberty. Before the decision to close Fresh Kills, there were plans to raise the mounds to 500 feet (152 metres), which would have made them the highest points on the Eastern seaboard. As it is, Fresh Kills was among the very few man-made structures visible to astronauts orbiting the Earth — along with the Great Wall of China; Fresh Kills’ volume actually exceeds that of the Great Wall and it could be regarded as the largest man-made structure on Earth. Top Fresh Kills’ capacity was filled quickly; in the late 1980s it was absorbing 90% of NYC’s solid waste. Center and above Winds of change: computer-generated images of the redeveloped site Click here to enlarge image A new strategy emergesWhen the city made the decision to close Fresh Kills it gave itself four years to accomplish the task of developing alternative disposal options, mostly a massive export programme. The city’s 2006 Comprehensive Solid Waste Management Plan (SWMP) — a 20-year plan — calls for virtually all waste to be moved out of the city by barge and rail. At present though, the city remains heavily dependent on trucks to haul to landfills in Pennsylvania and Ohio. This, in turn, is a legacy of the previous waste management regime. Looking to a greener future at Fresh Kills Click here to enlarge image Previously the city primarily used barges to bring waste from various sites around the city to Fresh Kills. This system relied on Marine Transfer Stations (MTS), which are not suitable for trucks. As a consequence, during the current transition period, the city has become dependent on the private waste disposal industry’s infrastructure, which is designed for truck hauling. This has helped push the cost of disposal from about US $40 per ton (0.9 metric tonne) to over $100. ‘The decision to close Fresh Kills was not an economic decision,’ remarks Turso. Heavy reliance on trucking is also costly due to the wear and tear on the metropolitan area’s infrastructure, air pollution, carbon emissions, and the nuisance factor for the communities hosting transfer stations and limited truck routes. This creates pressure for the city to effect its switch to rail and barge as quickly as possible. Implementing the plan The SWMP, approved by the State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) in October 2006, calls for compacting the waste and storing it in containers so that it can be barged or put on rails for long-distance hauling. From the MTSs waste is transported to one of several inter-modal facilities in New York Harbour, either across the Hudson River in New Jersey or on Staten Island, at the Howlands Hook, a growing freight handling facility. Once on barge or rail, transport distances become less of a cost factor, opening up many more final destination options, explains Turso. The city is currently working on securing long-term landfill agreements. By mid-August the city began to ship waste from the Bronxout on rail, after being loaded at the Harlem Yards. Together with the 1000 tons (907 metric tonnes) a day of municipal waste generated by Staten Island residents, the city is now exporting 25% of its SMW by rail. The city-operated State Island Transfer Stations (SITS), a 79,000 square foot (7339m2) facility located on the Fresh Kills site, was completed in 2006. In June 2006 the city awarded a 20-year contract to Allied Waste Systems, Inc to containerize, ship and dispose of the waste of the SITS. Compacted waste is sealed in 4m high by 6m long inter-modal shipping containers, which are loaded onto flatbed rail cars — four per car — before being hauled by rail to an Allied Waste landfill in South Carolina. A new rail line opened there this past April. Raising the percentage of SMW exported by rail is complicated by the difficulty of bringing back on-line four key city marine terminal stations (MTS) that have been inactive for the past six years or so. Two are in relatively industrialized sites in the city — the Red Hook in Brooklyn, and College Point, Queens, across the bay from La Guardia Airport — and as a consequence are less controversial than the other two that are in more residential areas — Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighbourhood and Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where a playground now adjoins the terminal on 91st, just a block and a half from Gracie Mansion, the official mayoral residence. ‘There is no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage or dispose of it, it’s just got to be done,’ Turso is fond of saying. The retrofitting plans for all four have already won approval from the City Council and the State’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), but community-level opposition still remains an obstacle. Turso admits the issue could even get detoured to court, but he expresses optimism that ‘within the next five years, at least two of the terminals will be brought on-line’. The lungs of the city Once the decision to decommission Fresh Kills was made, the follow-on decision to rebirth it as a park was less remarkable. New York currently enjoys at least half a dozen other parks within the city limits that were once landfills. The Fountain Ave. site is now in the final stages of being incorporated in the National Gateway Recreation Area. Other former landfill sites have metamorphosed into golf courses — Marine Park Golf Course in Brooklyn and the future PGA course at Ferry Point in the Bronx. There is another planned for Fresh Kills. But with roughly 10km2 of property, the scale of the Fresh Kills project makes any undertaking there unique. Certainly it is a rare opportunity to create a new, world-class, multipurpose urban park, one the NYC Parks Department has taken on with alacrity, with plans eventually to spent US $100 million. It will be the largest expansion of the city’s parks since a chain of parks was spawnedin the Bronx in the 1890s. Fresh Kills will have a broad mix of programmes, including a wide range of sports and art activities, but also large passive scenic tracts,and other areas of ecological restoration and habitat creation. The current draft plan maps out 330 acres (1.33km2) of passive and active recreation space, 130 acres (0.53km2) of open water, 315 acres (1.27km2) of wetlands, 770 acres (3.12km2) of meadows and 525 acres (2.12km2) of woodlands. More specifically there are plans for hiking, running (including marathons), bicycling (including mountain-biking), and horse riding, a range of field sports, soccer and lacrosse, as well as tennis, and large-scale meadows for picnicking, kite flying and community events, and of course water ways for kayaking and canoeing. There are also plans for a museum or gallery, art workshop facilities, an amphitheatre, and a night-sky observatory. A golf course, model airplane field and a marina with launch ramps are other possibilities. A limited number of commercial concessions, needed to generate operating revenue, are expected to be confined to the centre of the park, as opposedto its edges. A methane gas recycling facility has been in operation at Fresh Kills since 1999 Click here to enlarge image ‘People are especially sceptical about chain restaurants and generic development, but are amenable to distinctive, thoughtfully designed facilities,’ noted the draft master plan, which was approvedafter extensive public consultations. The plan envisions three ten-year phases to develop the park, which will be NYC’s second largest. The transformation begins Actual work transforming the reclaimed dump into landscaped parkland started in small steps in 2003, after extensive public consultations and multi-agency reviews. Final land use reviews are to be completed by the end of 2007 although several components of this ‘many parks within a grand park’ have already gotten underway or even been completed. The city has already begun or completed developments in Bloomingdale Park, 15 acres (6.1 hectares) of active and passive recreation land at Fairview Park, and a new synthetic turf soccer field at Midland Beach. At the 2005 launch of Owl Hollow Fields project — a US $6 million undertaking of ten acres (4.05 hectares) of active recreation space with two synthetic and two natural turf soccer fields, as well as new fitness and nature trails — Mayor Michael Bloomberg hailed it as ‘the beginning of one of the greatest environmental reclamation projects ever undertaken.’ The landfill temporarily re-opens Although originally slated for complete closure in 2001, a portion of Fresh Kills (sections 1 & 9) was reopened to accommodate the debris from the destruction of the World Trade Centre site. During the ten-month recovery effort, rescue workers carefully screened and sifted the 1.2 million tons (1.1 million metric tonnes) of material that came from the WTC site to Fresh Kills. There appears to be strong public support for including several sustainable energy demonstration projects harnessing solar, wind, water and methane gas. ‘Many feel these experiments would give the park a cutting edge identity and augment its educational value [although] a few worry that windmills might have an adverse effect on ambientnoise levels or on bird life,’ noted the master plan documents. Tapping the methane A methane gas recycling facility has been in operation at Fresh Kills since 1999 and in 2006 (FY), the Landfill Gas Purification Plant purified about 283 tons (257 metric tonnes) of methane per day. This is sold to KeySpan, a local utility (in the process of being purchased by UK’s National Grid), where it is distributed to some 10,000 customers on Staten Island. A new contract signed in June 2006 provides incentives for the contractor to maximize gas collection and sales; the city earns about $10 million annually from the gas sales A multi-million dollar, on-site leachate control plant treats roughly 200 million gallons (over 750 million litres) a year, before being safely discharged into the Arthur Kill estuary, where fishing could resume, under catch and release advisories (i.e. not safe to eat). It is anticipated that it will take a minimum of thirty years before waste decomposition is complete, associated gas production and settlement cease, and leachate fully drains from the site. As these processes occur, there will be a continuing need for regular maintenance, monitoring and evaluation of the site and systems that have been put into place, primarily the final cover, landfill gas (LFG) and leachate systems, as well as the extensive network of monitoring wells. It is essential that access to these systems be preserved during this time for inspection, maintenance and repair. What now? The sanitation department is continuing various closure and post-closure care operations. These include composting, addingfinal covering with dirt and impermeable clay layers to lessen leaching, as well as continued compacting and contouring of mounds to make sure they maintain basic integrity. There is also extensive environmental monitoring, including for leachate,landfill gas, and on storm and groundwater. With sanitation’s heavy equipment, and knowledge of the facility, it anticipates a role for the department there for ‘at least 30 years after the landfill is closed,’ according to the department’s 2006 annual report. ‘We are not going to turn over the keys anytime soon’ says Turso. Ken Stier writes about business and the environment from New York email: kenstier@earthlink.net