The Staten Island landfill once received 10m tonnes of waste annually. After 9/11, it unexpectedly became a burial site. Now its ‘trash mountains’ are being turned into a public park – but where does that leave New York’s waste problem?

“It stinks!” This was Staten Islanders’ first response when asked about Fresh Kills – their dubious civic landmark. For many years it was the largest landfill in the world, although since closing in 2001 it has been exhaustively remediated and now reportedly smells like “open meadows”.

Many residents still bear the scars of their role in New York City’s digestive system – the receptacle of practically all of its garbage for almost 70 years (it was opened in 1947 as a temporary dump on a salt marsh and agricultural land). The landfill has long contributed to Islanders’ sense of being a backwater; the forgotten borough, confirmed by its slow official response to the devastation wrought by Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Then there was Eric Garner, strangled by a cop on Staten Island in 2014 for selling loose cigarettes. That stank too.

I was born in New York City and spent nine years of childhood and 35 years of adult life there. Now and then I went to Staten Island for the ferry ride, art, friends, the Buddhist centre – but I’ve never seen Fresh Kills.

‘Kill’ is a Dutch word for stream. Long an apparent geographical misnomer, the name suddenly made tragic sense in 2001 when the landfill became a sorting ground and then burial site for personal effects and human micro-remains from Ground Zero. Some thought that mingling human bodies with garbage would cross a line, defy a social taboo. But expediency won out, and the site now known as West Mound holds the remains, human and architectural – almost a million and a quarter tons of them. A memorial is planned.

No public place is a better gauge of a society’s values than a landfill site. After the consumption of global goodies in the privacy of our homes, city-dwellers take out the garbage. The scale of this disgorging/excretion process is noticeable only during garbage strikes, when the stench of the bursting, plastic-bagged mountains on every street corner permeates daily life.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fresh Kills closed in March 2001, only to be used again six months later following the World Trade Center attacks. Photograph: Beth A Keiser/AP

Capitalism thrives on unsustainable growth and expansion while its by-products – its waste – also grow and expand exponentially. In the United States we toss 15 to 25% of the food we buy. We throw away stuff coveted by the rest of the world, exposing our social values as we dispose of its use value. All over the poorer world, children scavenge in the dumps where their families are forced to live.

No place is a better gauge of a society’s values than a landfill site

Commercial waste, which makes up two-thirds of the city’s 36,000-tonne daily total, did not go to Fresh Kills. Its circuitous journeys are another story, involving intensely competitive private carters, which were sometimes controlled by Mafia groups – including the Gambino and Lucchese families – and other organised crime syndicates. Still, Fresh Kills at its height received about 10 million tonnes of garbage annually, transferred from barges by cranes and dump trucks to create trash mountains that towered over the neighbouring communities.

What fills a landfill? Garbage archaeologist William Rathje says it’s not the styrofoam and disposable diapers we imagine, but paper – which biodegrades very, very slowly, after hundreds and maybe thousands of years. As an ageing writer and hard-copy freak living virtuously off the grid on solar power, and owner of far too many books – which may, in this electronic age, end up in landfills – I represent a sizeable percentage of the garbage-producing demographic. I shudder to think of my banished personal trash archive.

Although it was estimated that Fresh Kills still had 20 more years of capacity, the landfill was abruptly closed by three Republican officeholders who owed their victories to the people of Staten Island. By 2000, all five New York boroughs had found out-of-state sites to replace it, leading to more transportation by trucks, more climate-changing emissions. The 13,000 tonnes of residential waste generated by 8 million people every day have been diverted into a new “urban waste stream” (another kind of kill).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Garbologist William Rathje on a New York City garbage barge. Photograph: Getty Images/Science Faction

The 2008 bill for collecting and “disposing” of New York’s residential trash was around a quarter of a billion dollars. The insidious inequalities built into contemporary capitalism still make it easy to tell if you’re in a less visible neighbourhood that generates little clout or respect by the amount of trash in the streets. Residents tend to internalise neglect until some really heavy community organising gets under way, and pressure is applied to the most effective power points.

According to waste pundit Steve Cohen, the incineration of trash, which can also generate electricity, pollutes less than transporting waste in diesel-fuelled trucks to leaking out-of-state landfills. He recommends smaller-scale, community-based waste management facilities that would share the blessings and the burden of this most necessary public service.

The department of sanitation is currently involved in a long-term process to rebuild its marine transfer stations to export residential waste in containers by rail and barge – still expensive, but not as bad as trucks hauling it out of state and then coming home empty.

And then there’s recycling, which, even in the 21st century, has never been fully enforced in New York – it doesn’t pay well enough, so the stuff often ends up in the landfill. Each new mayor makes a resolution to amend this situation. Each new mayor fails.

News from the underworld

If Fresh Kills had stayed open, it would soon have become the highest point on the east coast – another marker of human triumph over nature, dubious heir to the great mounds of the pre-European Mississippian cultures.

After a tangled bureaucratic history, however, Fresh Kills’ 2,200-acre site is now moving toward its reincarnation as a public park almost three times the size of Manhattan’s Central Park. The New York sanitation and parks and recreation departments will be collaborating on its development for decades.

Field Operations, the firm of James Corner (architect of the extremely successful High Line on old elevated tracks in Lower Manhattan), won the International Design Competition for the master plan of Fresh Kills in 2001, and has suffered ever since from the frustration of trying to work creatively with 45 city agencies.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A rendering of what Freshkills Park will look like. Photograph: Freshkills Park/City of New York

The park plan has been viewed skeptically by some Staten Islanders, but certain aspects of the never-ending purification process are truly green. Methane is harvested on the site, providing energy to heat 20,000 local homes. Tree planting and other beautification efforts began in the 1980s and accelerated in 2008.

The mounds of refuse are being capped with an impermeable plastic liner and eight additional layers of barrier material to separate the ground we touch and walk on from the landfill below. Here an extensive network of piping and drainage channels works away unseen, emerging in the white stacks of the flare stations, bringing news from the underworld.

Reclamation includes a system for the capture of leachate (also known as garbage juice), containment and delivery for treatment, and a slurry wall around the site’s perimeter. As sea levels rise with climate change, a rehabilitated Fresh Kills will offer human-made wetland buffers for neighbourhoods threatened in the inevitable future storms.

The official website for the new and improved Fresh Kills features a deliriously positive view of the distant future. Areas of the park will boast networks of paths and waterways accessible by canoe, kayak, foot, horseback, bike or car, along with diverse wildlife habitats and research and educational facilities. There are existing precedents in “wildlife refuges” built on toxic sites across the country, like the plutonium production and nuclear waste dumps at the former Rocky Mountain Arsenal and Rocky Flats in Colorado, or Patricia Johanson’s monumental reclamation of a sewage plant in Petaluma, California.

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Fresh Kills will offer an ironic sanctuary from the climate effects its inefficient history has helped to produce. (It has been a bird sanctuary of sorts since its inception; historical photos show thousands of gulls circling the unloading barges and Athey wagons.)

So all’s well that ends well ... Fresh Kills emerges from the muck of death and decay smelling like roses? Green capitalism is good for everybody? The park will become a “post-industrial landmark”, as one critic called it? As a more or less communal production of social space, we can all take credit for it.

Actually, given the instability of the globe, the world, the planet, and the fact that New York City’s mountains of garbage will rise again in someone else’s backyard, we should worry. For most of its life, Fresh Kills may have been invisible to the population of New York City, its absentee landlords – but its undead impacts cannot be forgotten, escaping only as friendly gas.

This is an edited version of Lucy R Lippard’s essay Coming Clean, from Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, published by University of California Press Books in October 2016.

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