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Landfills: A Growing Menace
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Landfills: A Growing Menace
When asked to think of the largest man made structure, people will invariably come up with an answer like The Great Wall of China, the Great Pyramids, or the Taj Majal. In contrast to these striking achievements of mankind is the Durham Road Landfill outside San Francisco, which occupies over seventy million cubic feet. It is a sad monument to the excesses of modern society [Gore 151]. One must think this huge reservoir of garbage must be the largest thing ever produced by human hands then. 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, from Florida to Maine. At that height, the mound will constitute a hazard to air traffic at Newark airport [Rathje 3-4]. The area now encompassed by the Fresh Kills (Kills is from the Dutch word for creek) Landfill 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 ...
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