As a visual representation of how New York is running out of places to put its waste, the largest active landfill in the state is a striking one. The hulking Seneca Meadows landfill is already the height of the Statue of Liberty and its operators are seeking to raise it even further, to the consternation of nearby residents.
The landfill, situated in the scenic Finger Lakes region in the northern reaches of New York state, has grown since the ۱۹۸۰s to now sprawl across ۳۵۰ acres of deposited trash, mounded up to the height of around ۳۰۰ft – roughly the same height of the Statue of Liberty.
“All around the lakes is pretty flat until you see this monster of a hill,” said Mark Pitifer, a marketing administrator at Waterloo Containers, a glass packaging company that sits next to the landfill and is dwarfed by its neighbor. “I mean it’s incredible, it’s like being in downtown New York City only instead of a building, it’s trash.”
Locals in the nearby towns of Waterloo and Seneca Falls, the latter famed as the birthplace of the women’s rights movement in the US, had hoped the bulging landfill would be closed when its permit expired last year. But the operator, Texas-based Waste Connections, has proposed elongating the life of the landfill for several more decades via ۴۷ acres of newly lined disposal cells and adding another ۷۰ft to the trash heap’s height.
As New York state authorities mull whether to grant this expansion, the landfill has become a central point of grievance over the pungent smell, water pollution and planet-heating pollution given off by the places we dump our rubbish. Seneca Meadows is now the largest source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, in the state, according to a study last year based on researchers using aircraft measurements.
The operator, Waste Connections, did not respond to questions from the Guardian; it defends its environmental protections measures and record in statements on its website.
The increasing size of landfills also raises uncomfortable questions about how much waste we produce and what to do with it. Seneca Meadows receives around ۶,۰۰۰ tons of trash each day from across New York, with ۱,۵۰۰ of those tons originating from New York City, which sends its rubbish to landfills hundreds of miles away that are rapidly filling up and are set to be completely full within the next ۱۶ to ۲۵ years.
If burning rubbish or casually dumping it into rivers and the ocean is too environmentally harmful, what is to be done with our waste beyond continually supersizing landfills to the point they become a major climate, as well as local, hazard?
“We are at the precipice of a crisis,” said Emily Gallagher, a Democratic member of the New York state assembly who recently took a tour of the Seneca Meadows site and has convened a hearing on the state’s waste storage policies.
“There is this huge mountain of trash that is off gassing almost ۲۴ hours a day … contaminating the Finger Lakes, contaminating the groundwater,” she said of the site. “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 has stymied strict measures to reduce waste and enforce more recycling – she estimated ۸۰% of the Seneca Meadows contents could be recycled. But she added there needed to be a broader societal reckoning with the tsunami of trash, much of it from cheap and disposal items, we create.
“We say throwing away but there is no away,” said Gallagher, whose district includes a part of New York City’s borough of Brooklyn. “The problem is that it will take a culture change that people won’t want to do until it is forced in their faces. We used to have a much more circular economy, where people reused and rewashed everything, but we have been indoctrinated into a convenience culture, even if it then causes us more inconvenience.”
Dealing with trash is “gross problem”, Gallagher acknowledged. “But we need a much deeper conversation about it rather than continuously pushing it to the side because it’s uncomfortable and it confronts our human desire for comfort and our laziness,” she added.
The municipal government of New York City has pointed to recent efforts to reduce its waste, such as the pickup and composting of organic matter, which makes up around a third of what is left as trash in the city.
Yet New York City residents still create around ۱۲,۰۰۰ tons of trash a day and it will need to go somewhere. The city does not send residential trash to Seneca Meadows – although some private contractors do – but will be sending it further and further from the city, which has not hosted its own waste for several decades.
“As capacity continues to shrink in the region, we will likely export trash to further locations,” said a spokesman for the city’s sanitation department. “Our commitment to rail export makes this much easier than trucking.”
Yvonne Taylor, co-founder of Seneca Lake Guardian environmental group, stressed she didn’t want other communities to suffer living near growing landfills like hers had.
Residents routinely text her to say that they have had to remove their children from the nearby school because the smell had sickened them, or of ruined outdoor birthday parties and other gatherings, she said. Pitifer, of Waterloo Containers, said the company has had to install filtration equipment to help employees deal with the overpowering stench of the landfill.
“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,” said Taylor.
“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.
“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.”
The New York state department of environmental conservation and Waste Connections were both contacted for comment and did not respond.
Waste Connections says on its website that it is “dedicated to the preservation and advancement of the environment” and has an “exemplary compliance record”.
Its environmental protections include a “double composite liner” and a collection system for rainwater that has contacted waste. Landfill gas is captured and burned to generate electricity, it says, and there is ‘state of the art’ equipment and practices to capture odors which it says air monitoring data shows is effective. It says the gas is ۵۰ per cent methane and it is collected and controlled, and the system is monitored to evaluate its effectiveness.
