[GRRN] Closing of Fresh Kills Landfill in NYC

RecycleWorlds (anderson@msn.fullfeed.com)
Tue, 31 Aug 1999 12:21:48 -0500


NEW YORK TIMES
August 30, 1999, Monday
Metropolitan Desk

THE LAST LANDFILL: A special report.; As
Deadline Looms for Dump, Alternate Plan
Proves Elusive

By DOUGLAS MARTIN and ANDREW C. REVKIN
May 29, 1996, was brisk but brilliant, a splendid day for
celebration and
champagne on Staten Island as Gov. George E. Pataki and Mayor
Rudolph
W. Giuliani announced that the Fresh Kills landfill -- the biggest
dump in the
world, the last in New York City and the bane of the city's least
populous
borough -- would finally close.
There was one small problem.

Until 48 hours before the announcement, no one in the Mayor's
office had
bothered to tell the Sanitation Department about the timetable:
that after Dec.
31, 2001, not a single old shoe, not a single ''I New York'' coffee
cup, not a
single piece of rotting refuse would ever again be buried at Fresh
Kills. No
exceptions.
The department suddenly had to figure out what to do with the
13,000 tons of
household garbage added each day to the artificial mountain. Only a
few
months earlier, sanitation officials were still counting on using
Fresh Kills
for 15 more years or so.
Jaws dropped and expletives flowed, one senior sanitation official
said.
The challenge, another official said, ''seemed like skiing down a
slope with
a lot of trees, on one leg.'' Nevertheless, the politicians'
pledge, bolstered by
a state law that passed a week later, guaranteed that after nearly
50 years of
taking trash to the dump and covering it with dirt, there had to be
a new plan.
Thus began a long-running, and still unfinished, scramble that has
made New
York City the butt of jokes about trading culture for trash and has
produced
sharp divisions among and within the boroughs over the growing
burdens
they will have to bear.

FOR FULL TEXT GO ON WEB TO:
http://archives.nytimes.com/archives/search/fastweb?getdoc+allyears2+db365+
386373+0+wAAA+Fresh%7EKills

____________________________________
Peter Anderson
RecycleWorlds Consulting
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