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travel / great places / explorer / mj06

Explorer
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.


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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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Energy to burn Back to Index Send in the clowns

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