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Ben Preiss
Garbage Dump Turned Eco-Theme Park - Ariel Sharon Park (GALLERY)
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Over the years, the garbage pile at Hiriya dump site in Israel grew so big that the birds it attracted became a danger to the jets taking off and landing at Ben Gurion Airport.
From 1952 until it was closed nine years ago, Hiriya accumulated greater Tel Aviv’s trash for a total of roughly 565 million cubic feet (16 million cubic meters) and attained a height of 261 ft (80m).
Recycling plants have been working there ever since to reuse the refuse and capture the gases released by the mound. Soon the area will be renamed the Ariel Sharon Park after the Prime Minister who worked to keep the area out of the hands of developers and insure that it will a unique ecological park.
The Hiriya dump, closed nine years ago, will serve as the centerpiece for what is to become a vast 2,000-acre urban wilderness. The monumental dirt mountain, which sits at the intersection of some of Israel’s busiest highways, will be transformed into a beauty spot designed by a German landscape architect, Prof. Peter Latz.
“At first I thought it should go,” said Martin Weyl, a former director of the Israel Museum, who first came up with the idea of turning the dump into an attraction. “But then I thought garbage is a big part of our lives. We shouldn’t hide it.”
Instead, Hiriya is set to become an environmental beacon and a theme park on recycling for children, tapping into a global concern.
Three recycling plants already operate at the foot of the mound, grinding building waste into gravel and dry organic matter into mulch, and sorting ordinary household waste through pools of water, an Israeli company’s innovation that is still at the experimental stage.
The greenhouse gases are being collected from wells dug deep in the mountain and will soon be sold, in keeping with the Kyoto protocols on carbon trading, notes Danny Sternberg, the former engineer of the dump and now director general of the park. Eventually, energy from the mountain will fuel the park’s lighting at night.
“It will be a place people visit like Bilbao or Stonehenge, an international destination,” said Laura Starr, a New York landscape architect and former design chief for Central Park who has been an adviser on this park from the start.
(nytimes)
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Read More: worldarchitecturenews Via: nytimes
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