Blogs / Better Planet

The City of New York is turning the Fresh Kills landfill site on Staten Island into what it claims will be a world-class park.

Fresh Kills is famously the largest landfill in the USA if not the world. It is a massive dumpsite–more than 2,200 acres, or about 5 square miles. To put that into perspective it is about three times the size of Central Park in Manhattan. You can see it with the naked eye from outer space. Fresh Kills stopped officially operating in 2001. So the Puente Hills landfill in Whittier, CA is now the king of the landfills in operation. 

But even though it stopped operating there’s still a lot of trash to be seen in certain parts of the Fresh Kills’ site. I noticed a raft of bottles, bags and even bulldozers pushing large mounds of material around as I walked the site.

The city of New York holds tours of Fresh Kills; I made my own way around. And while it’s a little creepy thinking about the decades worth of trash you’re standing on top of (Fresh Kills is the tallest place on the Eastern Seaboard) there is something heartening about the prospect of turning something so nasty into something pretty. If nothing else, visitors may be made aware of the tragedy of our waste problem: Over the past 40 years we’ve doubled the amount of waste we send to landfills. And while the number of landfills in the US has shrunk considerably over that time, from more than 8,000 to less than 2,000 today, the size of those landfills has mushroomed 25 times. So while we are recycling more–about 14 times as much–we are still stewards of miles of trash.

The City of New York is trying to add Recreation to the list of “R’s”–Reduce, Reuse Recycle–which environmentalists live by. But I’d personally like to see less waste than play on it.     

Three trillion pieces of plastic are floating in the Pacific Ocean, with 46,000 pieces per square mile throughout all the oceans of the world. About 85% of that refuse comes from land—trash from picnics, beach outings, and general litter gets caught up with wind and makes its ways to sea. Or rivers and streams carry it out.

I’m recently back from the middle of the Pacific where I sailed onboard the research vessel Alguita as it prepped to trawl the Eastern Garbage Patch (an area twice the size of Texas that floats between San Francisco and Hawaii).

Miles offshore Hilo, Hawaii, I hung with Captain Charles Moore and his crew as they began their winter voyage to California. Their mission is to investigate the size and scope of the plastic debris that pollutes the area to better understand its effect on marine life.

But the most devastating experience I had was on Kamilo Beach, just past the southern most point of the United States on the Big Island. Moore’s Algalita Institute claims this is the most polluted beach in the US.

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