Goldworthy's Lambton and Leadgate Earthworks:

Goldsworthy's next public commission, the Lambton Earthwork near Chester-le-Street in County Durham, made in December 1988, faced him with a different type of location and size of project. He was commissioned jointly by Northern Arts and Sustrans, a company specialising in finding new uses for abandoned railway tracks, to build an earthwork on a section of the disused line between Consett and Sunderland. His new site was in an area scarred by the decline of heavy industry and marked in particular by the closure in 1980 of the Consett Iron Works and the ending of the town's railway link. With the old iron bridges over the former track left at either end of his chosen site, but a modern housing estate creeping up to one side of the railway embankment, the place has an air of being caught between old and new. Working for the first time in an area neither naturally beautiful nor remote from civilisation, Goldsworthy demonstrated that he was not bound by a specifically Romantic tradition of landscape art.

Nancy Holt's Sky Mound:

Nancy Holt, a contemporary ecological artist, transformed the problem of waste, one of the most pressing concerns of urban ecology, into a fertile ground for art. Sky Mound is a 57 acre landfill in New Jersey Meadowlands.

The latest technology has been employed to close the landfill. Decomposing garbage is contained by an invisible slurry wall. Recycled plastic liners made from old soda bottles cover the landfill and are topped with eighteen inches of soil. Methane gas, formed from decomposing organic garbage, is collected in a recovery system and used as an alternative energy source. Large metal posts form a solar area in the center of the park to mark the summer and winter solstice and equinox. Holt redesigned the 100 foot area as a park for people and wildlife to enjoy.

The Sky Mound project was to be built in two stages. The first stage begun in 1984, and completed in 1991, included sealing the landfill and cost nearly $11 million, paid by the state of New Jersey. Stage two includes nonfunctional sculptural sections and was to be funded by NEA, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a New Jersey state environmental bond. Funding was stopped in 1991 to conduct a technological study at the site, and currently construction remains postponed.

A landfill in northern New Jersey is the site for Sky Mound, a proposed reclamation art project by artist Nancy Holt. Her design would transform the site into a public park and astral observatory, as well as a habitat for plants and migrating birds. The site is a 57-acre, 100-foot mound, filled with over 10 million tons of garbage. The landfill has already been sealed and a methane gas recovery system has been installed. Holt's proposal would carefully sculpt the mound into a series of smaller earth mounds with steel poles and gravel pathways which would be seasonally aligned to the sun and other stars (Figure 11). This contemporary Stonehenge would mark the equinoxes and solstices and other astral phenomena. For example, the archways of the methane wellheads would frame the moon in its extreme positions in relation to the earth. Unfortunately, this innovative transformation of a trash heap into a platform to observe the cosmos has been put on hold. Apparently the site is still settling and is not yet stable enough for Holt's constructions.