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travel / great places / explorer / mj06
Circus city
Under the big top
Come one, come all to the site of North America's
largest urban landfill where, 70 metres underground, you'll
find 36 million tonnes of garbage, the marvel more than 30
years in the making. Witness an amazing transformation — the
most extensive environmental rehabilitation project undertaken
by the City of Montréal — that is turning the
brownfield green. Rabbits and foxes now frolic where 800 truckloads
of Montréal's trash were dumped each day between
1968 and 2000.
Since the early 1990s, 95 percent of the methane emissions
from decomposing garbage have been siphoned off the dump and
fed into an on-site biogas power plant, which generates enough
electricity to power 12,000 homes. The Tohu complex uses green
technologies such as recycled beams, renewable energy for
heating and a passive system that cools interior air by passing
it over ice. With grass now covering the trash mountain and
trees growing at the bottom of the old Miron limestone quarry,
the site is on its way to becoming one of Montreal's
largest public green spaces.
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