Mount Trashmore Park

On our roadtrip, after Chicago and St. Louis, we stopped in my home state:  Virginia.  I lived in Virginia for eight years growing up, so it was really fun to revisit.  When driving towards Norfolk, what did we see but Mount Trashmore!

Mount Trashmore Park, Virginia Beach, VA

Mount Trashmore Park is a city park that has been around since the mid '70s.  The park includes about 165 acres, and has several playgrounds, a basketball court, volleyball areas, a skate park, and walking trails.  The best part?  The whole thing was once an abandoned landfill!

Mount Trashmore itself is 60 feet high and 800 feet long, according to the City of Virginia Beach website.  It was created by repeatedly compacting the solid waste in the landfill, then covering the trash with soil and seed.  And voilà!  Mount Trashmore was created!  I remember rolling down Mount Trashmore and playing in the "Kids' Cove" when I was younger, so it was really great to see one of my favorite places from childhood again.

But another thing that was great about Mount Trashmore, besides being the best hill to roll down, was that it taught me about one of the ways we can reclaim old landscapes.  Similarly, this same thing is being done at Seneca Meadows Landfill, the largest landfill in New York State.

Seneca Meadows Landfill

Just yesterday, my roommate traveled to this landfill for a field trip for her Landscape Architecture class.  She explained to me how they, too, are compacting the solid waste and then layering on soil and seed.  Seneca Meadows Landfill doesn't take any toxic waste, so as long as it is properly taken care of, like by venting out the gas that builds up and preventing waste from seeping out, it, too, could eventually be made into a park like Mount Trashmore. 

Additionally, Seneca Meadows Landfill uses the gases (like methane) it extracts from the trash, which is a natural byproduct of decomposition, for energy to run both its own business and thousands of local homes and companies.  And instead of shipping away the water that is extracted from the trash to be filtered elsewhere, they filter most of their own water and reuse it on the trash to help aid decomposition.  So, both energy and water are closed loops at Seneca Meadows Landfill--a great use of resources and an excellent example of reclamation of waste lands!

A picture from the Seneca Meadows Landfill website showing the grid where the electricity they create at the Seneca Energy Gas Plant is transferred to, so thousands of local homes and business may use it

It is evident that in our increasingly materialistic culture, steps need to be taken to clean up after our seemingly never-ending waste.  By cleaning up landfills and using them for things like parks and energy, we can begin to fight the hard fight that is reclaiming our Earth!