Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (11 page)

IESI Bethlehem wasn’t on the Superfund list, nor had it received any notices of significant violations of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, or Resource Conservation and Recovery Act within the last two years. But then I looked back a little further. I learned that IESI had owned the Bethlehem landfill only since 1999, when it had purchased it from Waste Management for $65 million and an agreement to pay Lower Saucon Township (which included the city of Bethlehem) a host fee of $460,000 a year. A hot potato, the Bethlehem landfill had changed hands, just before IESI had bought it, three times in less than a year. There had been questions raised about groundwater contamination before IESI’s watch, and complaints about overweight, leaky, and generally unclean trucks. Within months of purchasing the landfill, IESI had an even nastier surprise. Workers excavating an old section of the property discovered 280 fifty-five-gallon drums and 55 five-gallon cans filled with lead, PCBs, creosol, and the solvents trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene. The drums, which had probably been buried in the fifties and sixties, were punctured and leaking. IESI paid for the cleanup: the waste was trucked to New York for incineration.

Two years passed, and IESI petitioned Lower Saucon Township for permission to expand its daily take from 750 tons to a maximum of 1,800. To sweeten the deal, the company offered two thousand-dollar scholarships to local high school students. Asked at a town hearing what would prevent someone from trying to hide hazardous waste in the bottom of a garbage truck, IESI’s consulting engineer answered, “Probably your conscience.”

Originally, the company had proposed increasing its daily maximum volume to two thousand tons. When Lower Saucon countered by advertising an ordinance that would have reduced the landfill’s Saturday hours and limited its daily maximum to one thousand tons, IESI threatened to sue the township. Apparently, their old host agreement had stipulated that the township could not oppose future increases. Wary of environmental impacts, the town next hired independent consultants to examine the landfill and asked IESI to conduct further studies on geology and search for contaminants. Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection ruled against further study and finally, in the spring of 2003, granted the expansion.

I still wasn’t getting anywhere running my own garbage to ground, so I took a little break and tracked the trash of neighboring Manhattan. Most of the five boroughs’ waste traveled to landfills far and wide, but about 60 percent of the stuff collected at Manhattan curbsides wasn’t buried anywhere. It was burned in the American Ref-Fuel waste-to-energy plant in Newark, New Jersey. One morning I drove out to the exurban wilds of the Meadowlands, which in pre-Fresh Kills days had been the largest garbage dump in the world, to see what this modern process looked like. As opposed to old-fashioned incinerators, which burn waste with comparatively few environmental controls, waste-to-energy (WTE) plants are technologically evolved contraptions that convert trash into energy while meeting state and federal air-quality guidelines. Across the country, there are eighty-nine WTE facilities operating in twenty-seven states. Collectively, they burn 13 percent of the nation’s garbage.

Surrounded by a tangle of potholed highway ramps, littered underpasses, brick warehouses with shot-out windows, and the phragmites-covered landfills of yesteryear, American Ref-Fuel looked sleek and modern under its skin of rose- and blue-colored panels. The parking lot smelled a little like a pigsty, thanks to the parade of garbage trucks, but the executive offices, where I met plant manager Jim White, smelled almost normal. White sat me down in a conference room filled with leather chairs and a long shiny table, then showed me a corporate video that explained, in language a ten-year-old could understand, the virtues of modern incineration. He clicked off the tape before the credits rolled and led me, in brisk silence, through a heavy door into a windowless concrete passageway. We clomped down a steel staircase to the grandly named tipping hall, where packer trucks pulled in and disgorged their loads onto a concrete pad. Eagle-eyed workers plucked large chunks of iron and steel, plus furniture, from the aromatic jumble. Over the course of a year, they’d salvage some forty million pounds of metal. (At an American Ref-Fuel sister plant nestled among scrub pines on Cape Cod—a facility that served a sixty-five-square-mile area and took the place of forty town dumps—big metal was pulled out, and then the garbage was shredded and run past magnets, which stripped out smaller chunks of metal, before it was subjected to flame.)

I watched a bulldozer push Manhattan’s trash, mingled with that of Essex County, New Jersey, into a concrete bunker three hundred feet long, ninety-five feet high, and seventy feet deep. When full, the bunker held thirteen thousand tons of trash, nearly the amount generated in a single day by New York City residents. (Commercial waste, remember, accounted for an additional thirteen thousand daily tons.) The stockpile would feed the fires on Sundays, the only day of the week that fresh garbage wasn’t delivered.

White and I climbed back upstairs to take a peek at the control room, where a young man clicked through a series of computer screens. His business was numbers, the quantification, in grams and degrees and tons, of American Ref-Fuel’s basic elements: air, water, fire, and garbage. Three color monitors featured continuous video feed from the glowing belly of the trash-burning beast. Mesmerized by the computer images, I took a photo, and then White brought me into a glass-walled control booth where a grapple operator named Romeo made tiny joystick movements that resulted in the fluffing of the bunker’s malodorous contents. “Believe it or not, there’s an art to this,” White said. “We’re making a unique combustion product.” Down below, the grapple steadily fed product in eight-ton bites, into a one-hundred-foot-long boiler on a 35-degree slant. We clomped back downstairs to its base. When I leaned toward a small glass window to see, face-to-face, what a 3,000-degree trash fire looked like, White barked, “Don’t touch!” The window was hot. The walls of the boiler were lined with water-filled tubes, he said, and while the garbage burned on roller grates and shrunk to a quarter of its original weight, it generated steam that drove two 50,000-horsepower turbines to create electricity. “We’re producing sixty-seven megawatts an hour right now,” White said, enough to power fifty thousand homes.

It sure sounded like a good idea: burn waste, get energy. “We’ve come a long way since the incinerators of the seventies,” White said. He described a complicated pollution-control recipe that involved scrubbers, electrostatic precipitators (to charge particles so they could be collected), flue-gas cleaning, combustion controls that minimized carbon monoxide, and injections of carbon (to absorb mercury), lime (to control sulfur dioxide and hydrochloric acid), and ammonia (to control nitrogen oxides).

But somehow, it wasn’t enough. Burning a mixed stream of natural and synthetic materials creates newfangled compounds that release dangerous gases. Plastic, for example, releases hydrochloric acid (which rapidly degrades the incinerator and contributes to acid rain), chlorine (which is then available to form dioxins), and toxic metals that have been added to the plastics to give them color, stiffness, and other desirable characteristics. Scrubbers and screens catch much of this stuff, but even minute quantities, once airborne, are considered by scientists to be extremely dangerous. Improved technology and higher air-quality standards have taken some metals—like chromium, copper, manganese, and vanadium—out of the smokestack only to concentrate them in bottom ash, which falls through the grate on the boiler’s floor. Though acknowledged to be toxic, the combined bottom and fly ash (which consists of fine particles removed from the flue gas by all those screens and filters) is dumped not in hazardous-waste landfills but, thanks to an EPA exemption, in landfills designed for household waste.

White told me the metals in his incinerator ash were “locked up” by these physical processes and therefore inert. Opponents of WTE believe this condition is only temporary and that toxins will eventually leach out, especially if the ash is combined with other materials and used in construction projects. This is just one of the so-called beneficial uses for ash that incinerator operators are pursuing. Remember, they pay to tip their waste product in landfills, too. Incineration reduces the weight of household trash by 75 percent, but that still leaves 3,222 tons for every bunker-load burned—hardly the discrete box of cremains that promoters of WTE would have you imagine such plants produce. The potential health and environmental impacts of beneficial reuse are unknown. New Jersey forbids landfills to use incinerator ash as daily cover, but other states aren’t so fussy.

The Newark plant had been running since the early nineties. Starting in the eighties, New York City had tried to build its own waste-to-energy plant, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, in Williamsburg, but community opposition defeated the proposal in 1996. More recently, Steven Cohen, of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, proposed in a
New York Times
op-ed a regionwide solution for the city’s solid-waste problems: ship city trash upriver to “depressed localities that dot the Hudson’s shores,” then burn it in waste-to-energy plants. Predictably, the idea sparked protest from those who lived in those depressed localities, as well as from recycling advocates capable of sniffing prejudice from three thousand miles away. “[T]he construction of waste incinerators in ‘depressed’ or ‘industrial’ locales has historically been associated with environmental racism,” responded the Ecology Center, of Berkeley. “Poor people of color are most likely to work and live near these areas, making them the primary victims of incinerator pollution.”

One afternoon I went up to Columbia University’s Earth Engineering Center to speak with Nick Themelis, who had been studying waste for five years and was a colleague of Steven Cohen. Themelis had closely cut white hair and wore a green pullover with a zipper at the shoulder. “Engineers came up with the problem of waste, creating new things faster, so we thought we ought to solve it,” he said. After looking at recycling and composting, “we realized that the benefits of waste-to-energy are crystal clear.” I asked how New York City officials responded to the reams of data he’d collected from the world’s most modern WTE plants. Themelis shrugged: he was fed up with their lack of interest. “I don’t care about New York,” he said. “If I can’t do it here, I’ll do it somewhere else.” He had plenty of customers, in other nations, for his incinerator expertise.

While engineers and chemists, community activists and environmentalists debate, one thing is certain: incineration, perhaps even more than landfilling, competes with attempts to reduce our nation’s enormous volume of waste. According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, most incinerators require “put-or-pay” contracts stipulating that local governments deliver a guaranteed tonnage of material to the incinerator or pay a penalty. If you have to pay anyway, why would you bother to reduce, reuse, and recycle?

Incinerator proponents argue that waste-to-energy can work in concert with recycling (in fact, says Alan Eschenroeder, of Harvard University’s School of Public Health, communities with WTE plants recycle on average at a rate higher than communities that landfill), and that there is enough garbage for everyone. The anti-incinerator crowd amps the fear factor: the unknown harms of persistent and bioaccumulative toxics, even if they do occur in quantities far lower than those of a decade past. (According to Themelis, emissions of dioxin, mercury, cadmium, lead, hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matters from WTE facilities dropped between 86.7 and 99.7 percent between 1990 and 2000.) But maybe the numbers don’t matter. Over the past decade, community opposition and tighter federal and state regulations have made siting and building waste-to-energy plants extremely expensive—about $120 million for a facility that processes just a thousand tons of trash per day. In fact, the US hasn’t seen a new one since 1996. (Other nations are more gung ho. Since 1996, 165 WTE plants have either been built or are under construction abroad.)

Arranging to witness the bonfire of Manhattan’s detritus had been refreshingly simple, but my quest to visit the IESI landfill in Pennsylvania was looking more and more quixotic. I decided to further broaden my parameters. I no longer cared about seeing my own trash interred in the ground: I’d be happy to look at Staten Island’s or even New Jersey’s. Through an acquaintance of an acquaintance, I got hooked up with Andy Reichel, an environmental consultant who had plans to visit the Monmouth County, New Jersey, landfill. He invited me to tag along.

A few weeks before the summer solstice, I sped past Fresh Kills, crossed into the Garden State, and wound my way east and south along the Jersey Shore. When I met Reichel in the parking lot, he warned me, “Just let me do the talking in there. Don’t say anything about IESI not letting you into Bethlehem.”

“Okay,” I agreed hesitantly. “But what are you going to say when the superintendent asks why I’m here?”

“He won’t,” Reichel said firmly.

We met Chris Murray in a nondescript conference room adorned with landfill maps. If he was curious about my presence, here, he didn’t let on. Monmouth County, we learned, had an unusual way of subduing municipal household waste: from the tipping floor, it went up a conveyor belt and into a hopper, which compacted the garbage into forty-five-cubic-inch bales. From behind a window thirty feet above the enclosed tipping floor, I watched as bulldozers shoved the county’s household refuse into an area the size of three basketball courts. The garbage reached a height of twenty feet; a bulldozer zipped down a narrow canyon that split the pile through the middle.

The bales seemed made up mostly of plastic bags—black and white and yellow, all of them torn and dulled with grime. I picked out individual objects: a propane tank, a plastic flowerpot, paper plates, a bathroom scale, sheets of folded paper, a banana crate, a small toy shovel, a large plastic horse. I asked Murray if he’d seen anything truly interesting in there. He said, “Dead rats, dead raccoons, dead cats.” Anything alive? I asked. “Rats, raccoons, cats,” he said.