What’s the single largest man-made structure on Earth?
Wrong answers include The Great Pyramid, The Great Wall of China and ( for you so-called ‘clever’ sods out there) Mubarak al-Kabir Tower in Kuwait.
The corect answer in-fact is Fresh Kill, the rubbish dump on Staten Island, New york, although Jimmy Carr’s alternative suggestion of Holland was quite amusing.
Opened in 1948, the Fresh Kills landfill site (named after the Dutch word ‘kil’ meaning: small river) soon became one of tyhe largest projects in human history eventually trumping (by volume) the Great Wall of China as the world’s largest man-made structure. The site is 12 square KM (4.6 square miles) in area and, when operational, twenty barges , each carrying 650 tons of rubbish were shipped in every day. Had fresh Kills continued to stay open as planned, it would have grown to be the highes point on the eastern seaboard. At it’s peak the dump was already 25m (over 80 feet) higher than the statue of liberty . Under local pressure, thwe landfill site closed in March of 2001, only to be opened again to cope with the enormous amount of rubble created by the collapse of the World Trade Centre.
It is now completely shut down and new resrictions mean that it can’t re-open (no landfill is allowed within NYC limits). The site is being currently flattened and landscaped into parklands and a wildlife facility. Nice!
Arguably there are structures which are spread across more space - the US road network, perhaps? The internet? The GPS satellite network? - but Fresh Kills landfill is the largest single cohesive structure.
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