Freshkills Park Series: Landfill Infrastructure
Taught by Laura Truettner
Laura Truettner is the Manager for Park Development for Freshkills Park. Before coming to the NYC Parks, she worked on community based redevelopment strategies for addressing brownfield sites and prior to that on investigating and remediating former petroleum, landfill and manufacturing sites. She is an urban planner and geologist by training.
The ongoing development of Freshkills Park is one of the most ambitious public works projects in the history of New York City, using state of the art ecological restoration techniques in an extraordinary setting for recreation, public art, and environmental investigation.
The City of New York established the Fresh Kills Landfill in 1948, before there was any large–scale development on the west shore of Staten Island. By 1955, Fresh Kills was the largest landfill in the world, serving as the principal landfill for household garbage collected in New York City. The four landfill mounds on the site are made up of approximately 150 million tons of solid waste.
The park’s mounds are being capped with an impermeable plastic liner and eight additional layers of barrier material separate the ground we touch and the landfill beneath it, one of them two feet thick. There are several systems in place to manage the landfill gas and leachate (the technical term for garbage juice) byproducts –some are visible, like the white stacks of the Flare Stations, but most are invisible, like the 10,000 linear feet of piping and drainage channels.
Learn more about the infrastructure that makes the park possible from Laura Truettner, Manager for Park Development.
This illustrated talk is the first in a series detailing the development of Freshkills Park in Staten Island.
