20 years on, the world’s biggest trash dump is now a green oasis

In its heyday, the Fresh Kills trash dump on Staten Island was one of the world’s great eyesores. Imagine New York’s Central Park with trash mounds 20 stories high. Now imagine that times three. That’s how bad it was. By the late 1970s, an estimated 28,000 tons of trash arrived at Fresh Kills every day. But where there once was a giant dump just 20 years ago, a massive green park now sits where flora and fauna do as they please. How did this come to be? 

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