Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (8 page)

We set a date for fieldwork, but early that morning it rained. We rescheduled, and once again got rained out. Weeks passed, the weather didn’t improve, winter closed in. Alderson’s spartina grass had wilted, and I knew he couldn’t count his stems until next spring. I was about to give up on seeing Fresh Kills from the water when, one weekend in the middle of December, the telephone rang.

“Come on,” said Alderson. “Let’s paddle around the landfill.”

“Okay,” I said, fist raised in silent triumph.

It was 25 degrees and the sky was leaden by the time I met Alderson at the refuge office. With his square chin and snub nose, and in his dark fleece jacket and jeans, he looked a little like George W. Bush, but taller. He had longer hair, too, and a different set of politics.

Together we strapped a three-person kayak onto Alderson’s battered Toyota, then drove to our put-in spot, on Travis Road. We manhandled the boat down a rocky grade and into a creek that was just a few inches wider than the kayak. As we adjusted the foot pegs it began to snow, but neither of us mentioned this development. The slate gray mud stretched out for yards on either side of us. I heard the rhythmic
thwack
of a hammer to the north. New houses were going up just outside the refuge, while old ones leaked raw sewage into the creek. “I try to avoid touching this water,” Alderson said.

I didn’t know what to make of the refuge, which had been the first wildlife sanctuary in New York City. Our put-in, high on Main Creek, lay amid a twelve-square-mile complex of derelict brownfields and thriving industry. There was a paper mill to the southwest, the landfill to the east, and a checkerboard of oil tanks to the west across the Arthur Kill, which carried more boat traffic annually than the Panama Canal.

Hemmed and hampered by this built environment, the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge provides shelter for hundreds of native plant and animal species. Founded in 1928 with a land purchase by the Audubon Society and named after a Staten Island naturalist, its 260 acres contain salt meadow, low marsh, forested uplands, rock outcrops, a swamp forest, spring-fed ponds, and alluvial dunes. Those dunes, which protrude like whale backs above the marsh, are composed of sandy deposits that were swept up by strong currents or prevailing westerly winds from the bottom of Lake Hackensack when its water level plummeted some ten thousand years ago. The lake itself, which once covered the western shore of Staten Island and the eastern shore of New Jersey, was formed by the terminal moraine of the retreating Wisconsin glacier. When the lake drained (possibly due to a breach in a natural earthen dam), its rushing waters carved the narrow channel known today as the Arthur Kill, into which Main Creek flows.

We stroked downstream through black water flanked by mudflats and brown grasses. A raft of mallards pivoted in the rising wind. Then suddenly, as we rounded a bend, the mound of Fresh Kills’ Section 6/7 rose before us. (The garbage at the landfill was heaped into four enormous mounds, called sections.) I had expected something massive—the size of the dump impresses every visitor, and few media accounts fail to mention that astronauts can see Fresh Kills from low Earth orbit. But from the water, Section 6/7 was just a steep hill jutting maybe a hundred feet above the deck of our bow, its knee-high brown grasses undulating in the breeze. A few dump trucks, burdened not with garbage but with dirt, trundled up switchbacks, black dots on the landscape. The air smelled lightly of methane. Crushed plastic bottles and old tires festooned the creek sides.

With our fingers growing numb, we shipped our paddles and shoved our hands inside our jackets. I turned to look north, toward the refuge, and was struck by the beauty of this place, the alacrity with which the marsh turned into scrub forest—white oak, red maple, sweet gum, and black willow. Before the city began dumping here, this patchwork of marsh, meadow, and forest was the norm. “The landfill supplanted one of the largest tidal areas on the East Coast,” Alderson said. “The salt marshes of Fresh Kills, Jamaica Bay, and the Hackensack Meadowlands were unrivaled in their abundance and diversity.”

Fifty-three years ago, the writer Joseph Mitchell spent some time in the marshes with Happy Zimmer, a shellfish protector for the Bureau of Marine Fisheries. Zimmer described the marshes and their uplands as a busy and bounteous place. Locals hunted for mushrooms in the autumn, dandelion sprouts in the spring, mud shrimp, herbs, and wildflowers in the summer. Wild berries and grapes went into jams; watercress from freshwater tributaries made salads. In 1929, the Crystal Water Company began bottling and selling springwaters that meandered down toward the sea. Zimmer noted great numbers of pheasants, crows, marsh hawks, black snakes, muskrats, opossums, rabbits, rats, and field mice.

By 1951, when
The New Yorker
published Mitchell’s story about Zimmer, the city had already filled in five of the “once lovely” clay pit ponds at Greenridge, on the dump’s southern flank. “The marshes are doomed,” Mitchell wrote. “The city has begun to dump garbage on them. It has already filled hundreds of acres with garbage. Eventually, it will fill in the whole area, and then the Department of Parks will undoubtedly build some proper parks out there, and put in some concrete highways and scatter some concrete benches about.”

The current nudged us toward shore, and Alderson raised his binoculars. “Ring-billed gull,” he said. “Canada goose. Great blue heron. Geotextile lining.” He aimed his paddle at a scarf of exotic black lying against the brown of Section 6/7. The high-tech tarp was part of Fresh Kills’ final closure plan, a barrier that was supposed to keep rain from the garbage and provide footing for future soil and vegetation.

When the EPA began examining landfill impacts in the 1980s, it adopted the “dry tomb” philosophy of landfill construction, which focused on isolating garbage from its immediate surroundings. New landfills, the agency said, would have liners that protected groundwater from leaking garbage juice; collection pipes to funnel this juice into treatment plants; methane-collection pipes to vacuum the gases created by biodegrading organic material; and, when it was time to close the landfill, some sort of plastic layer that would act like an umbrella and keep rainwater from percolating through the waste. Dry garbage, went the argument, was inert, quiet, and calm. Wet garbage, engineers knew, would generate leachate for thousands of years: the dumps of the Roman Empire, more than two thousand years old, are still leaching today.

But there’s one problem with dry-tomb landfills: plastic covers and plastic liners break. It is widely acknowledged, including by the EPA, that even the best plastic will ultimately leak, and well before the waste it contains ceases to threaten the environment. How long does waste pose a threat? According to G. Fred Lee, an environmental engineer who’s devoted his entire professional life to the study of landfills, “For as long as the landfill exists.”

And so in recent years, a new philosophy of waste has edged its way into civil and biological engineering circles. The so-called bioreactor method is just the opposite of the dry tomb, calling for leachate to be collected and then repeatedly injected back into the garbage. All this moisture accelerates decomposition, so that bacteria feeding off waste produce more gas more quickly. After the fermentation of waste has stopped, the dump contents are rinsed with fresh water, and the toxic runoff is collected and treated before final discharge. Because the garbage shrinks while it decomposes, the landfill settles and stabilizes faster (while monitors are still keeping an eye on things, it is to be hoped). Landfill managers like the idea of this method because they don’t have to collect and continually treat their leachate. But because there is a lot more of it cycling through their dump, there is more liquid to potentially leak. Leak-detection liners do exist, but they are very expensive and, said Lee, “No one uses them.” While university scientists in biological engineering departments are busily running wet-tomb bioreactor models in bins outfitted with Plexiglas windows, the EPA is monitoring long-term experiments on four actual bioreactor landfills in California, North Carolina, and Virginia.

“Another problem with bioreactors,” said Lee, who actually favors the wet method, “is that most household garbage is sealed inside plastic bags, which get compressed by big machines but not always ripped open.” And if the garbage isn’t exposed to moisture, it might as well be sitting in a dry tomb. Shredding every bag before it’s buried would solve the problem, but this would add about a dollar a ton to tipping fees, said Lee. The job may be too messy even for a dump.

Fresh Kills is neither a dry tomb nor a wet bioreactor. Like any landfill, it produces leachate, a noxious stew of household toxics, such as battery acid, nail polish remover, pesticides, and paint, combined with liquid versions of rotting food, pet feces, medical waste, and diapers. An analysis of free-flowing leachate sampled from landfills of the Hackensack Meadowlands turned up oil and grease, cyanide, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, nickel, silver, mercury, and zinc. To capture the leachate flow at Fresh Kills, which shares this pestilential profile, engineers encircled the uncapped garbage mounds with leachate walls dug seventy feet deeper than the lowest layer of garbage. Comprising perforated pipes, the walls funnel garbage juice to the dump’s private water treatment plant, where it runs through an intensive detoxification program before being discharged into the Arthur Kill. The leachate walls, in place only since 1996, capture much of the three million gallons that flowed daily before the landfill was capped, but the laws of hydrogeology will not be denied. Ancient streams and channels still run through the former clay pits (remember, they aren’t lined), and twice a day tides still flush escaping leachate into New York Harbor.

Liquefied parsley stems and mucus-filled tissues are gross, but leachate from residential garbage has some far nastier characteristics. In addition to pathogens from organic waste, it also picks up metals and acids, motor oil, and solvents from ordinary compounds used in the home. According to Garbage Project studies, about 1 percent by weight of all household garbage could be considered hazardous by EPA standards. Nail polish, for example, contains several chemicals listed by the EPA as hazardous. According to researchers at Texas A&M University, the leachate produced inside Subtitle D landfills, which contain only municipal solid waste, and Subtitle C landfills, which contain hazardous waste, is chemically identical.

I wasn’t throwing out drums of rat poison or anything else that seemed chemically risky, but since recycling had been suspended in New York, I tossed out plenty of plastic containers. I was surprised to learn that most household cleaners and shampoos come in bottles that contain the industrial organic chemical dicyclohexyl phthalate, a plasticizer that’s suspected of disrupting the endocrine system and harming the liver.

State-of-the-art landfills have composite liners that conduct leachate to a plant where it is treated, then discharged to a local waterway. But, again, even the most sophisticated liners eventually leak. Geomembranes are eaten away by common household chemicals, stuff like mothballs, vinegar, and ethyl alcohol. (I was guilty of discarding the first two items, but not the third: my booze bottles were always empty when I threw them out.) And then there’s human error—seams improperly sealed, holes poked by heavy equipment. Leachate collection pipes become clogged with silt or mud, or are blocked by the growth of microorganisms or the precipitation of minerals. Weakened by chemical attack, pipes are crushed by garbage.

Landfill covers fail, too: freezing and thawing cycles erode them; plant roots try to penetrate them. Woodchucks, mice, moles, voles, snakes, tortoises, ants, and bees innocently attack the cover from above, while buried tires, which have a habit of rising from the dead, threaten from below. If the cover becomes exposed, sunlight dries out clay layers and destroys plastic membranes; subsidence, caused by settling of the waste or organic decay, can result in cracks, too. So fragile are these systems, say landfill opponents, that state-of-the-art landfills merely delay, rather than eliminate, massive pollution to groundwater. The classical dump, at least when it comes to protecting groundwater, may even be preferable to modern landfills, where monitoring stations are spaced too far apart to detect fingerlike plumes of leachate springing from tiny holes. The unlined dumps leak evenly, said G. Fred Lee, and you know pretty quickly when your off-site groundwater becomes tainted by garbage.

The EPA requires landfill owners to monitor their sites for thirty years postclosure to control leachate and methane buildup, which causes fires and explosions. After this period, there is no funding to monitor water or air, to maintain landfill covers, or to remediate any eventual pollution. Over time, landfills pose more of a threat to the environment, not less.

Our hands were warmed up now, and I asked Alderson what effect the dump had on the nearby plants and animals, most of which had evolved in the absence of leachate. “Nitrogen and phosphorous are essential nutrients, though they can also be contaminants,” he said. “But the net effect seems to be beneficial. Our spartina’s growth exceeds or is equal to growth in a natural marsh.”

I couldn’t hide my surprise: after all, raw sewage flushed into creeks and channels upstream, and the tides swept umpteen kinds of poison from the landfill into the water twice a day. And it wasn’t as if the Arthur Kill, into which Main and Fresh Kills Creeks flowed, was sluicing the place clean on every flood tide, either: there were twenty-five hundred acres of old and unlined landfills in the Meadowlands, just up the harbor from the Arthur Kill, out of which flowed a little more than a billion gallons of leachate a year.

But Alderson was sanguine about all this. He judged the marsh’s health by its productivity, which he measured by colonization of benthic invertebrates, like ribbed mussels, by colonial wading birds, and by fish. He was happy to report the presence of baby bluefish, raptors, and egrets. Such resilience astounded me, though I’d later learn that cadmium and other persistent pollutants from the water were showing up in bird eggs and chicks, possibly jeopardizing their long-term survival.