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Trashy Travel: Israel's New Recycling Park

We do our best to appreciate even the weirdest tourist attractions, but we're still not sold on visiting a landfill outside Tel Aviv. Set to be renamed Ariel Sharon Park, the 2,000-acre dump will be converted into a veritable theme park of trash, with exhibits that are all-too-in-your-face.

A visitors' center is already in place, with a reception desk crafted out of recycled bottles and benches fashioned from crushed soda cans. Plans for a pond and landscaping are in the works, and money collected from the dump's recyclables will soon go to keeping it lit at night.

The landfill itself closed down nine years ago, so it's not as trashy as you might imagine. But it's still near a garbage transfer station that provides some stink, and the pile still emits plenty of methane and sulfur. That won't be stopping trash fans, though, says a former Central Park designer who's worked on the project:

It will be a place people visit like Bilbao or Stonehenge, an international destination.

Related Stories:
· Ayalon Park [Official Site]
· Recycling the Whole Dump in Israel [NYT]
· Chinatown Garbage Tour [Jaunted]
· Israel Travel coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times]