There are currently no active landfills in New York City. The last operating landfill in the city was the Fresh Kills Landfill which occupied 2,200 acres of Staten Island. While it was once the largest landfill in the world, it closed down in March of 2001. It was reopened temporarily during the aftermath of the September 11th terror attack as a place to sort through and bury the debris.
Otherwise, all of New York City’s solid wasted is shipped out of the city. Much of it ends up in New Jersey where it is either incinerated, or sent on a much long journey to landfills as far as Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia. Besides for releasing huge amounts of carbon emissions, this transportation costs the city $300 million a year!
Landfills are a great temporary solution for containing solid waste. It is better for waste to end up in a landfill than to settle in the environment or in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Landfills are carefully designed in a manner that isolates them from surrounding environments. They include a bottom layer to protect the potentially toxic liquids in the waste from infiltrating groundwater. While municipal solid waste landfills use synthetic plastic to form this layer, sanitary landfills utilize a clay liner. Landfills are covered daily with a layer of soil to prevent the stench of the waste from spreading.
Landfills are a reasonable method for storing waste. The problem lies in the amount of solid waste we emit. In this instant gratification, disposable world we live in, anything can be replaced. We dump it, dump out, dump him/her.
We need to shift our mentality to one where we value everything we have, be it a plastic container that we can either wash and reuse, or new electronics (do we really need the newest model every year?). Industry understands our disturbing habit for acquiring material wealth and they feed into this habit by creating products that will only last so long, forcing us to dump and buy more, and then dump some more. We, as consumers, must demand better quality products and learn that we can function just fine on less!
wastednyc 