Lanfills
LanfillsIt has long been believed that the largest entity brought upon the Earth by
humankind is the Pyramid of the Sun, constructed in Mexico around the start
of the Christian era. The mammoth structure commands nearly thirty million
cubic feet of space. In contrast, however, is the Durham Road Landfill,
outside San Francisco, which occupies over seventy million cubic feet of the
biosphere. It is a sad monument, indeed, to the excesses of modern society
[Gore 151]. One might assume such a monstrous mound of garbage is the
largest thing ever produced by human hands. Unhappily, this is not the case.
The Fresh Kills Landfill, located on Staten Island, is the largest landfill
in the world. It sports an elevation of 155 feet, an estimated mass of 100
million tons, and a volume of 2.9 billion cubic feet. In total acreage, it
is equal to 16,000 baseball diamonds [Miller 526]. By the year 2005, when
the landfill is projected to close, its elevation will reach 505 feet above
sea level, making it the highest point along the Eastern Seaboard, Florida
to Maine. At that height, the mound will constitute a hazard to air traffic
at Newark airport [Rathje 3-4].
Fresh Kills (Kills is from the Dutch word for creek) was originally a tidal
marsh. In 1948, New York City planner Robert Moses developed a highly
praised project to deposit municipal garbage in the swamp until the level of
the land was above sea level. A study of the area predicted the marsh would
be filled by the year 1968. He then planned to develop the area, building
houses and attracting light industry. Mayor Impelliteri issued a report
titled “The Fresh Kills Landfill Project” in 1951. The report stated, in
part, that the enterprise “cannot fail to affect constructively a wide area
around it.” The report ended by stating, “It is at once practical and
idealistic” [Rathje 4]. One must appreciate the irony in the fact that
Robert Moses was, in his day, considered a leading conservationist. His
major accomplishments include asphalt parking lots throughout the New York
metro area, paved roads in and out of city parks, and development of Jones
Beach, now the most polluted, dirty, overcrowded piece of shoreline in the
Northeast. In Stewart Udall’s book The Quiet Crisis, the former Secretary of
the Interior lavishes praise on Moses. The JFK cabinet member calls Jones
Beach “an imaginative solution … (the) supreme answer to the ever-present
problems of overcrowding” [Udall 163-4]. JFK’s introduction to the book
provides this foreboding passage: “Each generation must deal anew with the
raiders, with the scramble to use public resources for private profit, and
with the tendency to prefer short-run profits to long-run necessities. The
crisis may be quiet, but it is urgent” [Udall xii]. Oddly, the subject of
landfills is never broached in Udall’s book; in 1963, the issue was, in
fact, a non-issue.
A modern state-of-the-art sanitary landfill is a...
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