CVA Blog

The world’s largest man-made structure is not The Great Wall of China, or indeed, anything great at all. It is in fact Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, New York. But thankfully, it is now being reclaimed, and will soon develop into a large natural wetland park area.

Fresh Kills, New York

Opened as a temporary landfill in 1947, the area covers 2200 acres, and at its highest is taller than the Statue Of Liberty. The 225 foot high mass can be seen with the naked eye from space. Originally, the land was a salt of intertidal marsh, much like the rest of Staten Island, and it contains forests, tidal wetlands and freshwater wetlands, as well as the four giant mounds of household waste.

Nature has clearly adapted to this unnatural mass. The Isle of Meadows at the mouth of the Fresh Kills Estuary is a source of material for herons building their nests, and the landfill sits beneath the Atlantic Flyway, the route used every spring and autumn by migrating birds.

But it’s not all idyllic. Over the years, the waste leaked thousand of pounds of toxic chemicals and heavy metals into nearby waterways. As a result, it was closed in 2001, except for a brief period when it hosted the rubble from the World Trade Centre.

Fresh Kills, New York

So, now the City of New York, led by the Department of City Planning have embarked on a mission to turn the site into an area of beauty, a civil parkland to match it’s starkly pretty surroundings. And already, three of the four mounds of rubbish have been capped and nature is returning to the waste. The park will be three times larger than Central Park, another creative use of reclaimed land. The ecological restoration will also provide settings for public art, sports facilities and recreational areas. So, the city is hoping that what once was a blot, will soon become something great.

The video cassettes we all use are made up of various oxides and plastics, none of which are bio-degradable, and none of which are recyclable in the traditional sense – we can’t readily turn them into drinking bottles – but we CAN recycle them for your own re-use (read more about that here). So, let’s have a look at what simply throwing your video tapes in the bin can do for our planet.

Every month, companies like CVA prevent over 3 tonnes of videotape ending up in a landfill. In a year, that amounts to 88,000 tapes, 36 tonnnes, or the equivalent of four whole articulated lorries. But it’s not enough. Nicholas Stern, in his recently published report on global climate change, estimates that waste in land fills accounts for 3% of the UK’s emissions – and that’s not factoring in the emissions spewed out in making these products. As an industry, we can make a greater contribution to cutting these levels of waste down.

“Re-using and recycling lead to less resources being required to produce new goods and a reduction in associated emissions … Climate change will have serious impacts on world output, on human life and on the environment … It is not an option to wait and see, we must act now.”

The Stern Review

If clogging up our land fills when there is no need wasn’t bad enough, throwing plastic in the bin could mean it ends up in our oceans.

According to Greenpeace, there is a large vortex of discarded plastic floating in the Pacific, that can swell to the size of Texas. That’s an area three times larger than the entire UK. And 80% of this plastic originates from the land. Of course, we’re not saying your discarded tapes are bobbing around the Pacific, but we’re only adding to the problem by not recycling them. The vortex is made up of debris from all around the globe, and it is trapping and choking wildlife, and killing birds like the albatross.

“We’ve seen photos of albatrosses who eat this plastic … Even though their stomachs are filled, they end up starving because there are no nutrients in there.”

The Greenpeace ship M.Y Esperanza has recently departed Hawaii as part of their Defending The Oceans campaign, where they had seen rubbish covering the coastline, but out at sea, they saw an even greater problem. “The danger to marine life has been known for decades, but the scale of the problem has not been realised. With plastic consumption rapidly increasing globally, plastic has become ubiquitous in the ocean.” They believe that marine pollution will only be stopped if we all take responsibility and adopt a zero waste policy which includes recycling.

To find out more about recycling your video tapes for re-use, please explore the rest of our site.