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It’s a short ride on a sunny, arid morning down Congress Street in downtown Tucson, Arizona, to the dusty field that’s home to the Rio Nuevo landfills.
Right now, Nearmont, the smallest of three landfills on the site, doesn’t look at all like one. It’s just a bumpy 90-acre stretch of wide-open, dusty land beneath the shadow of downtown’s skyscrapers and against the bone-dry Santa Cruz River.
Drive back about 1,000 feet on the utility road, and you’ll see a chain link fence with an open gate. The chain link surrounds a square plot of land, fifty feet long and wide. On the plot at exact intervals is a nine-point grid of PVC piping penetrating the landfill beneath. A small construction trailer sits against the fence. And across from that, a large utility box, wires running into the ground.
To the untrained eye, it looks to be nothing more than a Tucson city water experiment. Or to the more suspicious in the desert, a covert government project. But this experimental PVC pipe grid - and what it’s doing underneath the landfill - could change the way brownfields sites of tomorrow are remediated.
Past, Future and Present
Behind the chain link fence is the City of Tucson’s bioreactor project. It is the physical beginning of a monumental and aggressive brownfields land remediation and redevelopment project. The landfill will become part of Rio Nuevo - an entire city district in the heart of Tucson’s downtown.
Projected, Rio Nuevo will take at least 20 years and $350 million to complete. The new bioreactor technology on Nearmont is paving the way for the Rio Nuevo of the future: an entire city district that will pay homage to the city’s historic past as one of the oldest settlements in the West.
In fact, archeologists have found that people have lived in the Tucson area as far back as 2,600 years ago. What’s now Nearmont was once part of the land where the San Augustin Mission was established in mid 1700s. The old Mission included a convento - a priest’s residence and trade school - a mission garden, a chapel, a granary and smaller storage buildings, the entire grounds surrounded by a wall. By 1840, the Mission had finally been abandoned.
As the Mission ruins disappeared into the late 1800s and early 1900s, the site became home to a clay pit. That ceased operations for good in the 1940’s, until it became its final incarnation: a 1950’s-era city dump. For twelve years, the site saw the only the city’s trash, until it was closed and forgotten in 1962. Thirty-seven years passed until Rio Nuevo had its rebirth.
In November of 1999, Tucson politicians put Proposition 400 in front of the voters - its purpose to raise $60 million in Arizona state tax money over ten years to help fund the Rio Nuevo project. It passed by a convincing 62% margin.
Among the planned projects at Rio Nuevo are a full-scale recreation of the San Augustin Mission and adjoining Cultural Plaza. Also planned are an Arizona Historical Museum, an American Indian Cultural Center and a Mercado with retail stores. More downtown housing will be added. Future additions include the Sonoran Sea Aquarium, the Tucson Science Center, an IMAX Theatre, an expanded Tucson Convention Center, and a City Visitor’s Center.
But the completed vision of Rio Nuevo is some years away. What Rio Nuevo has now is what’s behind the chain link fence - the experimental bioreactor.
100 Years in 40 Months
Underneath the Nearmont landfills lie decades of Tucson refuse. Between 15 and 50 feet of it.
The problem: the trash beneath the landfill must be degraded and made non-reactive. That, added with the methane gas landfills naturally produce make it too undesirable for building. Otherwise, any construction on the land would be at least century away - the time it would take the garbage in Nearmont to degrade naturally.
Tucson’s Office of Environmental Management (OEM), however, was preparing a solution - the bioreactor. But remediation technology like it had never been used before. If it did work, and proved safe and cost-effective, it would be used to remediate the other landfills.
The process it performs is called enhanced aerobic degradation. Simply, the nine-spot PVC pipe grid - dug under the ground and inside the landfill - naturally accelerates the landfill degradation by pumping controlled amounts of air and water into the refuse itself.
According to the data OEM has collected so far, the bioreactor will break down and settle the refuse, as well as eliminating the landfill’s natural methane production, in about 40 months. The end result: Composted land, ready for development.
Not only that, Tucson’s bioreactor has proven safe and cost-effective. Most importantly, it works. So well, that it's being made into a full-scale system for use on all three landfills.
"Build Your Own Light Up Dump Truck"
It looks like its already built? 😊
Found for 25¢ at the overstock store.
4/15/2022
Seen passing overhead Steamboat Rock State Park was "Boeing 21 Heavy" performing a fuel dump. Trail of fuel lasted about two minutes after aircraft has passed.
View this potentially sinister late-night vignette Large On Black
"And I found a place it's dark and it's rotted
It's a cool, sweet kinda place where the copters won't spot it
And I destroyed the map that I carefully dotted, however,
Every-day I'm dumping the body
It'd be better for us if you don't understand
It'd be better for us if you don't understand
Better for me if you don't understand..."
- Gord Downie [The Tragically Hip : 'Locked In The Trunk Of A Car']
Dipping back into the images from the late summer trip to London again; for the A Day In Capital City album.
The Dump (87,812 square feet)
801 N Military Highway, Norfolk, VA
Opened June 28th, 1996; originally 1974-built Kmart
Phnom Penh, Cambodia. February, 2003. Phnom Penh's huge landfill in the early 2000s smoldered perpetually, which did not stop the gleaners from making a living on top of it. The more agile pickers work right around the bulldozers that stir the surface. Most of them live in villages inside or adjcent to the dump, so they never leave the smoke and stench.
Another big dump...sorry...
Following on from my comments last night about maps and travel journals... I have just created a new set – Travel journal-style pages and these pages from last's years big trip were never previously uploaded as single images.
A collection of some of my favourite pages that are in a journal style...ie. not just a single 'great' sketch on a page. Ones that tell a story, ones that I enjoy looking at and re-living months, years later.
Just for the record, I selected this pages during a morning of sitting in the sun flicking through the actually books and tagging the pages that spoke to me on that occasion. it would probably be a different collection if I chose them via my flickr set.
The narrow gauge railway from Ponferrado to Villablino used steam traction into the 1980's. The line is now closed, and the locos are dumped at Ponferrado.
the "dump no waste - goes to the ocean" signs above the drains in hawaii have a humuhumunukunukukapua'a fish stencil!!
My first 3-D cake. I made this for my cousin's son's second birthday. He's really into trucks, and this Wilton's version was perfect.
I wasn't sure how to decorate the back, so my sister helped me make Brenner a license plate. Cute, isn't it?
And yes, the front wheel popped off during transport, so it's resting against the cake. I knew I should have brought a little bit of royal icing.
Pollution and waste is very common around population centers
2006 © UNEP
For further information go to www.unep.org/disastersandconflicts