New York weighs expansion as state’s landfill space runs short
The Seneca Meadows landfill has grown since the 1980s into the largest active landfill in New York, sprawling across 350 acres of deposited trash in the scenic Finger Lakes region and mounded up to around 300 feet — roughly the height of the Statue of Liberty. Its operator, the Texas-based company Waste Connections, is seeking permission to raise it further.
Local residents had hoped the bulging landfill would close when its permit expired last year. Instead, Waste Connections has proposed elongating the landfill’s life for several more decades by adding 47 acres of newly lined disposal cells and another 70 feet of height. New York state authorities are now weighing whether to grant the expansion.
The site sits near the towns of Waterloo and Seneca Falls, the latter famed as the birthplace of the women’s rights movement in the US. The landfill has become a central point of grievance over its smell, water pollution and planet-heating pollution. A study last year, based on researchers using aircraft measurements, found Seneca Meadows to be the largest source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, in the state.
Mark Pitifer, a marketing administrator at Waterloo Containers, a glass packaging company next to the landfill, described the view from his workplace. “All around the lakes is pretty flat until you see this monster of a hill,” he said. “I mean it’s incredible, it’s like being in downtown New York City only instead of a building, it’s trash.” Waterloo Containers has installed filtration equipment so employees can cope with the stench, he said.
The scale of the site reflects the volume of waste New York must place somewhere. Seneca Meadows receives around 6,000 tons of trash each day from across the state, with 1,500 of those tons originating from New York City, which sends its rubbish to landfills hundreds of miles away that are filling up and are set to be completely full within the next 16 to 25 years.
Emily Gallagher, a Democratic member of the New York state assembly whose district includes part of Brooklyn, recently toured the Seneca Meadows site and has convened a hearing on the state’s waste storage policies. “We are at the precipice of a crisis,” she said. Of the site itself she said: “There is this huge mountain of trash that is off gassing almost 24 hours a day … contaminating the Finger Lakes, contaminating the groundwater.” She added: “People we met in town are in really bad shape, we need to shut this expansion attempt down now.”
Gallagher said intense lobbying and donations from interests aligned with the plastics and fossil fuels industries have stymied strict measures to reduce waste and enforce more recycling, and she estimated that 80% of the Seneca Meadows contents could be recycled. She also argued that a broader societal reckoning with the volume of trash is needed. “We say throwing away but there is no away,” Gallagher said. “The problem is that it will take a culture change that people won’t want to do until it is forced in their faces.”
New York City residents create around 12,000 tons of trash a day, and the city has not hosted its own waste for several decades. The city does not send residential trash to Seneca Meadows, although some private contractors do. The city’s sanitation department pointed to recent efforts to reduce its waste, including the pickup and composting of organic matter, which makes up around a third of what is left as trash in the city.
The city expects to move that waste farther out as room runs short. “As capacity continues to shrink in the region, we will likely export trash to further locations,” a spokesman for the city’s sanitation department said. “Our commitment to rail export makes this much easier than trucking.”
Yvonne Taylor, co-founder of the Seneca Lake Guardian environmental group, said residents routinely text her to say they have removed their children from the nearby school because the smell sickened them, or that outdoor birthday parties and other gatherings had been ruined. Taylor said she did not want other communities to suffer as hers had. “We certainly don’t want to push this burden onto another community and say, ‘Oh, we just don’t want it here. You guys take it.’ That’s not our philosophy at all,” Taylor said. “Our philosophy is that we need to start somewhere, and that somewhere is with Seneca Meadows.”
Taylor pointed to everyday products as an example of where substitutes exist. “We don’t need to use plastic grocery bags, we don’t need to use plastic toothbrushes, toothpaste, shampoo bottles, and laundry detergent bottles – all of those things can be packaged in other materials that don’t wind up in a landfill,” she said. “So the solutions are out there. We just need the political capital to turn this around.” In the meantime, though, the Seneca Meadows expansion must be halted, she said.
Waste Connections did not respond to questions from the Guardian, and the New York state department of environmental conservation also did not respond to a request for comment. On its website, Waste Connections says it is “dedicated to the preservation and advancement of the environment” and has an “exemplary compliance record.” The company says its protections include a “double composite liner” and a collection system for rainwater that has contacted waste, that landfill gas is captured and burned to generate electricity, and that it uses “state of the art” equipment and practices to capture odors, which it says air monitoring data shows are effective. The company says the gas is 50 per cent methane and is collected and controlled, with the system monitored to evaluate its effectiveness.