After the closing of Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill in 2001, the New York City Department of Sanitation has spent nearly one billion dollars every year on high transportation costs and out of state disposal fees to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and South Carolina.

The New York City Trash Exchange is a skyscraper for vertical waste management located at the Hudson River Rail Yards, the former site for freight transfer from train to ships. The City of New York reinstates the yards to collect, process, and distribute for recycling 36,200 tons of garbage produced everyday.
Vacuum shafts through existing underground infrastructure will collect trash, eliminating on-street garbage trucks. Barges will transport plastic, metal, glass, and paper recycle-ready from the New York City Trash Exchange to recycling plants along the Hudson River.
The Hudson River Rail Yard is surrounded by the northern terminus of High Line Park and is also on axis with Madison Square Garden, Penn Station, and the Empire State Building. Above the rail yard, a botanical garden connected to the High Line will be a gathering space where New Yorkers and tourists view the spectacle of fluctuation between object and anti-object conditions in the tower and below this platform via reconstituted rails. Visible metabolism of waste within a skyscraper contests the traditional use of the skyscraper as object.