From Garbage Dump to a Beautiful Park

Imagine taking a landfill and turning it into a beautiful national park where sightseers come all around the world to visit. This was the vision of two Spanish architectures, Batlle and Roig, who took a garbage dump near Barcelona and turned it into an award winning agricultural landscape. This project won the Energy, Waste and Recycling category at the 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Spain. Described by judges Luis Mansilla and Martin Keiding as, "a perfect example of bringing dead nature back to life by converting rubbish into a beautiful piece of landscape architecture...using few and humble means." Another innovatory project in the category was called the Community Cooker that takes garbage and turns it into food, which is being used in Kiberia.

Batlle and Roig took Spain's largest landfill, which was used for more than thirty years and held more than twenty million tons of garbage, and transformed it into a picturesque park. At the entrance, large, steel cages still hold garbage to remind citizens what the park once was. The hilly design helps prevent erosion and gives the park a natural look. There is a underground drainage system to filter toxic wastes, while bio-gases that are being emitted from the landfill is being turned into electricity. In addition, water is being recycled to irrigate the plants and trees.

We need to inform more people that we could recycle landfills and turn them back into their natural state. This project shows that we can undo our environmental damage. This could lead into a cleaner future, causing less animals like fishes and birds die from pollution in the sea or in land. It is interesting that more and more people are finding ways to make useless garbage that pollutes the environment into useful products that make life easier and better. Martin Keiding said, "It's a very beautiful and simple design. It is landscape architecture that is inspiring. It is a very good example that everyone could look at and say: 'We could do the same.' " Will this trend of taking landfills and turning them into environmentally friendly parks as Keiding says catch on? If it does catch on, where will all the garbage that filled these landfills go? In the article, it was ambiguous about where the twenty million tons of garbage went. I cannot comprehend where that much garbage went. Did most of it get dumped in another place, or was most of it decomposed and used as compost?

Sources:
Matthew Knight, "From Landfill to Landscape"