Some of Staten Island\u2019s tallest hills are made of household rubbish, and there are four of them.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Sealing the mounds<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Decomposing waste also produces methane, and most of it gets sold rather than burned off. Freshkills Park\u2019s engineering pages<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Six months after the last barge<\/p>\n Fresh Kills reopened.<\/p>\n Governor George Pataki amended the closure order so that material from the World Trade Center site could be brought to the West Mound. The Department of Sanitation\u2019s 9\/11 exhibit<\/a> records about 1.4 million tons arriving by barge and truck, some of it screened so finely it passed through a quarter-inch sieve, in an operation that ran around the clock for ten months. What was left afterwards went into a 48-acre area on the hill, set down on a foot of clean soil and covered with more of it. Engineers then redesigned the methane capture network to skirt the perimeter, so that ground would never be disturbed again.<\/p>\n The birds turned up on their own<\/p>\n Nobody planted the sedge wrens.<\/p>\n Roughly half the site is grassland now, seeded with native warm-season species as part of the capping work. In August 2020, researchers from the College of Staten Island and NYC Parks found three pairs of sedge wrens nesting on the East Mound. New York State lists the species as threatened, and it had not bred anywhere in the five boroughs since 1960. Writing in Urban Naturalist<\/a>, Jos\u00e9 Ram\u00edrez-Garofalo, Shannon Curley and Caitlin Field documented at least three fledglings, with birds still on site in mid-October. That is a single record from a single season, not a general finding about reclaimed landfills. The wrens did come back the following summer, and grasshopper sparrows, bobolinks and eastern meadowlarks have settled on the mounds too.<\/p>\n Ram\u00edrez-Garofalo, who manages science and research development at the park, told CNN<\/a> that undisturbed temperate native grassland of this kind is scarce across the whole of New York State.<\/p>\n Opened in pieces, from the outside in<\/p>\n Twenty-one acres opened in October 2023: paths, a wetland overlook, a bird-viewing tower, a composting toilet running on solar power. It was the first piece inside the old landfill footprint that anyone could walk into. Gothamist<\/a> reported a full build-out scheduled for 2036, by which point the 2,200 acres will be the second-largest park in the five boroughs and nearly three times the size of Central Park. Freshkills Park<\/a> describes the approach as building from the edges inwards, prioritising the neighbourhoods that had to live next to the thing.<\/p>\n Upkeep is the part that tends to get lost under the before-and-after photographs. The city\u2019s own site history lists 238 groundwater monitoring wells sunk around the mounds and sampled every quarter, with sanitation carrying a minimum of 30 years of post-closure responsibility. Crews mow the grasslands once a year, in autumn, and the parks department tells them when the ground-nesting birds have fledged so the machines can go out. Two agencies, one mowing window, renegotiated every year. There is no completion date on that arrangement.<\/p>\n Follow Science Blog on Google<\/p>\n Add us as a preferred source to see more Science Blog reporting in Google.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some of Staten Island\u2019s tallest hills are made of household rubbish, and there are four of them. 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