page_title: Fresh Kills Landfill
section_title: September 11, 2001 and aftermath
hierarchical_section_title: Fresh Kills Landfill / History / September 11, 2001 and aftermath
caption_attribution_description: English: Worker combing through debris from the World Trade Center at the Fresh Kills landfill, Manhattan is visible in the distance
context_page_description: The Fresh Kills Landfill was a landfill covering 2,200 acres in the New York City borough of Staten Island in the United States. The name comes from the landfill's location along the banks of the Fresh Kills estuary in western Staten Island.
  The landfill opened in 1948 as a temporary landfill, but by 1955 it became the largest landfill in the world, and it remained so until its closure in 2001. At the peak of its operation, in 1986, Fresh Kills received 29,000 tons of residential waste per day. From 1991 until its closing it was the only landfill to accept New York City's residential waste. It consists of four mounds which range in height from 90 to about 225 feet and hold about 150 million tons of solid waste. The archaeologist Martin Jones characterizes it as "among the largest man-made structures in the history of the world."
  In October 2008, reclamation of the site began for a multi-phase, 30-year site redevelopment. The landfill is eventually expected to be developed as Freshkills Park.
context_section_description: After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Fresh Kills was temporarily re-opened to be used as a sorting ground for roughly one-third of the rubble from Ground Zero. More than 1,600 personal effects were retrieved during this time.
  About 1.6 million tons of material obtained from Ground Zero was taken to the landfill for sorting.
  Thousands of detectives and forensic evidence specialists worked for over 1.7 million hours at Fresh Kills Landfill to try to recover remnants of the people killed in the attacks. A final count of 4,257 human remains was retrieved, but only 300 people were identified from these remains. A memorial is being built to honor those whose identities were not able to be determined from the debris. The remaining waste was buried in a 40-acre (160,000 m²) portion of the landfill; it is highly likely that this debris still contains fragmentary human remains.
caption: Worker combing through debris from the World Trade Center at the Fresh Kills landfill; Manhattan is visible in the distance
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