WasteScapes:
Latent Opportunities for Landfills

Pennsylvania’s Slate Belt, a string of small communities southeast of the Blue Mountains, is named for its onetime slate extraction industry. The landscape, once dotted with working slate quarries, now houses massive anthropogenic voids and landforms with only a few remaining working quarries.

Opportunistic waste management companies  and quarry owners have tried to fill quarries with waste and dumps (illegal and otherwise) have sprung up in the Lehigh Valley. 

Trash is big business in Pennsylvania, as the state is the largest importer of trash in the country and profits relatively handsomely off of the “industry”.

Like slate extraction, landfilling leaves massive anthropogenic traces on the landscape, which begs the question: Does a massive landscape of waste have to be a waste of space?

Can the addition of present and future amenity to an operational landfill serve as a new model of working landscape while subverting future landfill expansion?