Consumer pyramid for New York

Press, 17 May 1989, Page 17

Consumer pyramid for New York

MARTIN BAILEY reports from New York New York is building a pyramid of rubbish which will soon be three times taller than the Statue of Liberty and even larger than the Great Pyramid. This monument to the disposable age is receiving 5000 truckloads a day of the city’s rubbish. When complete, the Staten Island dump will top 150 metres and will become the highest point on America’s east coast from Florida to Maine. The city will have the world’s largest garbage dump. Each New Yorker is contributing a tonne a year towards it, says a sanitation department spokesman. Rubbish has been dumped in a disused quarry near Little Fresh Kill Creek for 40 years, but it is only recently that the pyramid’s base has risen sufficiently to give New Yorker’s a real impression of the project’s scale. Fresh Kills, the dump’s official name, lies just 19km from downtown Manhattan. Only a small proportion of the city’s rubbish is incinerated or recycled — most of it ends up on Staten Island. For the inhabitants of the least populated of New York’s five boroughs, the dump symbolises their relationship with powerful neighbours. Every day, 25 heavily laden barges are brought up the creek to Fresh Kills. More than a million plastic sacks of rubbish are unloaded daily and hauled up the side of the pyramid. The plastic sacks quickly split open, and the mountain of rotting rubbish attracts thousands of scavenging birds. At night, the rats emerge. Fresh Kills is now growing too quickly, and the New York City Council has introduced a recycling law which will require householders to separate out paper, glass and tins. But even with recycling, the flow of “regular garbage” will mean that the top of the Fresh Kills pyramid is likely to be reached by the year 2004. By that time, Fresh Kills will be visible from many of Manhattan’s skyscrapers. The pyramid will then be grassed over, and turned into a park with a two-lane highway spiralling to the top. The other legacy of Fresh Kills will be a mound of decomposing rubbish which may provide archaeologists of the future with a fascinating insight into late twentieth century urban man. Copyright London Observer