Garbage mountain is transforming into a paradise

TEL AVIV — One of the greatest achievements for the green movement in Israel in the past few years was the government decision in 2005 to create Park Ariel Sharon, whose namesake lobbied vigorously for its establishment.

The park was originally named Park Ayalon, and it covers a vast 2,000-acre area that borders the southern entrance to Tel Aviv and the city’s southern satellite cities. By comparison, Central Park in New York City is around 900 acres. 

The dominant landscape feature of Park Ariel Sharon is the inactive Hiriya landfill, which towers more than 80 metres above sea level, and is 400 metres wide and one kilometre long. It provides breathtaking views of Tel Aviv to the west and the Judean Hills to the east.

The Hiriya landfill closed in 1998, but a waste transfer station still operates at the site, where trucks bring most of central Israel’s waste before it reaches the Negev Desert in the south.

With the decision to create Park Ariel Sharon came pitched legal battles between the Israeli green movement and parties with real estate interests in the land who didn’t want to see the entire area designated as parkland, because it would come at the expense of their plans to build thousands of housing units.

Israeli environmentalists were elated when the National Planning Board decided in 2007 that the entire area proposed for the park would be designated exclusively as parkland. The Park Ariel Sharon Company is the government body created to oversee the park’s creation. 

To celebrate the future park in grand style, in the presence of the current Environment Minister Gilad Erdan, members of former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s family and many other park well-wishers, the Hiriya garbage mound  was illuminated by electric lights for the first time on July 19, with the power coming from gas derived from recycled trash.

The garbage mountain will be lit up every night and will stand, say environmentalists, as a constant reminder of wrongs done to the environment in the past, how the harm caused can be alleviated and how Israel’s relationship to the environment can be improved.

With the main bureaucratic hurdles for the establishment of the park now out of the way, what remains is the transformation of the empty fields and the Hiriya landfill into a natural oasis in the middle of the Tel Aviv metropolis.

The German architect Peter Latz won the competition to design Park Ariel Sharon. Latz’s plan is to rehabilitate the Hiriya landfill by covering the garbage mountain with native plant species and trails. But bringing the park from the drawing board to reality will require hundreds of millions of dollars and years of dedication from both Israelis and Jews around the world. 

Martin Weyl is the visionary who pioneered the idea of the park and the preservation of the Hiriya garbage mound.

A former curator and director of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Weyl said that it “will take around 55 million U.S. dollars to rehabilitate the Hiriya garbage dump and around 155 million to develop the entire park, so there is a long road ahead to see the park to completion.

“But the great interest in it and the energy that has gone into it until now has created momentum that will result in the park’s ultimate realization, and this is very exciting.”

Most of the funding for the initial development of the park have come from the Beracha Foundation, an Israeli charitable foundation.

The Israeli government has so far matched the funds donated by the Beracha Foundation so that enough money – $17 million – is now available to the Park Ariel Sharon Company to rehabilitate one-third of the garbage mountain. Phase 1 of the endeavor is underway and is scheduled to be completed in two years.

Although the park will take decades to complete, it’s currently open to visitors and is an interesting off-the-beaten-track destination for tourists.

At the base of the Hiriya garbage mound, there’s a large visitors centre displaying a model of Latz’s winning design for the park. A designer in residence at the visitors centre finds items from the waste transfer station and creates stylish household items from them.

The visitors centre has become an important site for environmental education in Israel, and elementary school students comprise most of the 50,000 visitors that have visited so far this year. The Park Ariel Sharon Company expects 100,000 people to visit next year.

The park’s website www.ayalon-park.org.il provides contact and other information in English.