DESIGN AGENDA FOR MILLENNIUM PARKLANDS 

The reburial of waste from old landfills, combined with the exposure of large areas of poor quality clayey fill left large areas of landscape without an adequate topsoil layer. Planting into this low quality clayey fill had given rise to significant problems and previous failures. 

A severe Newington Village site left Waste Services and the Olympic Coordination Authority with no choice but to look at waste soil fill materials for the reconstruction of a workable soil profile. Both the cost economically and environmentally, of importing quality commercial topsoil in such quantities rendered this option impossible.

The physical plan was based on three unifying design themes; lowlands, consisting of walls and rooms in the landscape, and elevated landforms. A park-wide system of woodlands and forests, acting as walls defined spaces and settings, and were designed to provide connections between the various settings and facilities within the park. The walls would also play a key role in providing habitat diversity and green corridors to connect the various

CONTEXT OF MILLENNIUM PARKLANDS 

The Parklands surround the site of the 2000 Sydney Olympics at Homebush Bay, covering an area slightly larger than New York City’s Central Park that had once been home to various industrial uses and was contaminated with commercial and industrial waste. The strategies devised to deal with huge quantities of both contaminated material and clean fill on site, to integrate the technical water recycling systems, and to create an environment in which native plants can thrive, have set world standards. The resulting parklands, which were designed to be dry and self-sustaining, reconnect residents of the western suburbs to Sydney’s major waterway and provide recreation and education opportunities for 2.5 million visitors annually.

monitoring, maintenance & effectiveness

According to the Soil Scientist, Waste Services NSW had to strip, relocate, and encapsulate hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste over large areas along the Haslam’s creek corridor, with some of this waste being of high toxicity. This was dealt with in the old fashioned manner; a swamp/ salt marsh area was used as a landfill site, with waste placed on top of a 1-1.5m deep sheet of swamp land and roughly buried with clean fill. 

The method used to rebury this material was an encapsulation technique where an impermeable base is constructed and waste is placed in a naturalistic landform on top of this to be capped by a specially chosen impermeable clay cap. The Kronos Hill and North Newington hills are examples of waste
reburials developed in this manner.