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Earlier this year, Mayor Bloomberg and I embarked on a mutual odyssey of sorts. While he went looking for a new place to put the city's garbage, I went chasing after mine.
City Limits Magazine
So when Bloomberg unveiled his plan for the city's garbage in late July, environmentalists and community activists across the city cheered. After briefly considering incineration, he proposed exactly what they had been advocating for years: Retrofit eight dormant waterfront stations around the city--once used to barge trash to Fresh Kills--to containerize New York City's residential garbage and ship it to out-of state landfills via land or water. "We won!" exulted Brooklyn environmental activist Tina Filiato to fellow organizer Sal Cantelmi shortly after the mayor's announcement. Eddie Bautista, co-founder of the Organization of Waterfront Neighborhoods, hailed the Mayor's plan as "the biggest victory in environmental justice in the history of New York City."
But was it? The plan, which will take at least two years to implement, solves two urban environmental problems. By exchanging trucks for barges, it will get many diesel-spewing trucks off the city's streets. It will also distribute the city's garbage burden more equitably, with each borough becoming responsible for its own trash.
Beyond New York's borders, however, the mayor's plan hardly looks like a victory for anyone--except, perhaps, garbage hauling companies. Outside the city limits, the new plan is essentially the same as the old plan: ship it, by train or by truck, to out-of-state landfills. "Is it our right to dump trash from eight million people into our next door neighbor's backyards in West Virginia or Pennsylvania--to put it in landfills that will eventually leach into the surrounding groundwater?" asks Steven Cohen, an environmental policy analyst who favors incineration.
"Landfilling is not an ideal technology, but compared to incineration in densely populated places, it's preferable in the short term," says Bautista, adding, "I'm not saying it's right, but a lot of these communities accept it to receive extra benefits." Bautista is referring to "host community" agreements, in which garbage companies pay fees to local governments in exchange for the right to operate a dump.
And the towns that host the landfills? "With all due respect, they're reaping the consequences of what they sowed," says Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and solid waste expert for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "They allowed that to happen. Maybe they bought into the host community benefits. They got a new school. They got a new library. They got lower taxes. So now they're reaping what they sowed."
Because their Greenpoint-Williamsburg neighborhood takes in more garbage than any other area of the city, I asked Filiato and Cantelmi, a few weeks before the plan was released, where they thought it ended up after leaving Brooklyn. Filiato said she thought it was going to "rural landfills" in Pennsylvania, what Cantelmi referred to as the "outskirts," where not many people lived. But neither knew for sure. None of the activists awaiting the mayor's decision had been to any of these landfills. That's when I realized I had to find out for myself, and there was only one way: Follow the garbage.
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When I contacted the city's Department of Sanitation last April, saying I wanted to follow my 4.46 daily pounds of garbage from my Brooklyn home to its final destination, the department pledged full cooperation. But by June, as the deadline for the mayor's long-awaited garbage plan drew near, it had stopped responding to my calls altogether. If I was going to follow the garbage, I would have to do it on my own.
After studying the department's vendor contracts, I calculated that Waste Management, Inc., disposes about 7,500 tons of the city's household waste every day in 16 jumbo Pennsylvania landfills, all of which the company owns. One landfill outside Scranton gets the most--more than 10 percent of our total garbage a year. But first, 1,400 tons a day makes its first stop at a mammoth transfer station on Varick Avenue in Cantelmi and Filiato's backyard--Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Transfer stations are the hubs where the city's household trash joins the commercial garbage generated every day by restaurants, office buildings and construction sites. Of the city's total 28,000 daily tons of trash, about 40 percent is trucked into 16 waste transfer stations in Greenpoint-Williamsburg every day, where it is compressed and then loaded onto tractor-trailers bound for out-of-state landfills.
Like an invading army, hundreds of monster-size garbage trucks rumble through Cantelmi's streets every day, belching exhaust fumes, rattling sewer grates and shaking apartment walls. Since the waste transfer stations began sprouting in the working-class community a decade ago, Greenpoint has gained the city's highest concentration of airborne lead, and asthma rates have shot up to the second-highest in the city. (Hunts Point, with another concentration of transfer stations, has the highest.) Before the trash onslaught, rats were never a problem; now they feast openly around the clock. And the foul odors--a weird mixture of sour food and the cheap cologne used as a masking chemical agent by the transfer stations--seem to have no expiration date.
Cantelmi, a 72-year old retired sanitation worker, is tormented by the daily convoy of trucks and the illegal shortcuts many of them make to cut through Greenpoint's residential blocks. "The police were out there this morning writing violations," he reports gruffly, with little satisfaction, at a meeting of Organizations United for Trash Reduction and Garbage Equity (OUTRAGE), a Brooklyn coalition of community groups that banded together in the summer of 1999 to fight the steady influx of waste transfer stations into their neighborhoods. A lifelong Greenpoint resident whose old trash route included his own neighborhood, Cantelmi is wearing yellow-tinted glasses and a t-shirt sporting a picture of John Muir, the 19th-century environmentalist who founded the Sierra Club.
When asked to describe what bothered them the most about the daily garbage bombardment, several of the others talked angrily about the terrible odors, and not being able to sit outside on summer nights--"not because you're going to get mugged," said Marie Leanza, a 60-year-old grandmother, "but because the rats are going to get you."
They had gathered at a senior citizens center to discuss Waste Management's pending application to process an additional 600 daily tons of "putrescible waste" (the official term for wet garbage) at the Varick Avenue transfer station. "That's a little amount in the scheme of things," says Filiato, who is lobbying elected and sanitation officials to reject the permit. "But if you let this pass, then they want more tomorrow, and as you can see, it all adds up."
The Varick Avenue transfer station looks more like a military installation than a garbage processing plant. Although the sign on the green facade says "Welcome to Waste Management," the corporate office in Houston rejected my request for a tour. So I found my own tour guide: a former mafia driver who knows the garbage route well.
Michael Daubert is the former personal driver and bodyguard to Sal Franco, who, with his brother Carmine, controlled northern New Jersey's garbage business from the mid-1970s to the 1990s. New Jersey and New York law enforcement agencies have long accused the Francos of being associated with organized crime; in 1998, Carmine Franco and two of his sons pleaded guilty to corruption and fraud charges, and agreed to fines totaling $16.5 million. The settlement also permanently barred the Franco family from participating in New Jersey's solid waste industry. Several months after the plea, the Francos sold their four trash companies in Hillsdale, New Jersey, including a recycling facility and transfer station, to Waste Management for $46 million.
Half Italian, half Irish, Daubert insists that he is not a mobster. "I had my chances to go in, but I didn't want to," he says to me, as we sit in a car across the street from the sprawling transfer station on an unseasonably cold and rainy mid-June morning. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Daubert made regular trips down I-78--the "garbage interstate" that cuts across the center of Pennsylvania, where many of the state's 51 landfills are located [see map ]--taking the Francos to various landfills the family had business with.
In a blinding rain, Daubert keeps pace with 18-wheelers veering in and out of lanes on I-80, which we picked up shortly after exiting the Holland Tunnel in New Jersey. In the three-plus hours it takes us to drive from Waste Management's Greenpoint transfer station to Waste Management's Alliance Sanitary Landfill outside Scranton, we ride alongside dozens of the 450 tractor-trailers that make this trip daily, each one loaded with 20 tons of garbage bound for landfills in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Combined, the 300-mile round trips of these 450 trucks add up to approximately 135,000 miles. About a thousand 10-ton New York City Department of Sanitation trucks carry waste to various transfer stations in New Jersey each working day, traveling a total of 40,000 miles. All told, garbage trucks burn 33,700 gallons of diesel fuel while carrying 9,000 tons of city trash a day to Pennsylvania and Virginia landfills. The emissions from these trucks, incinerator advocates say, are one of the worst environmental costs of landfilling.
To pass the time, Daubert talks about his days shepherding Sal Franco around to mob meetings, charity dinners with sports celebrities, and political fundraisers. "I brought my boss to all the New Jersey political functions and events," he says, shaking his head. "We went to Christie Todd Whitman's inauguration, to Bill Bradley fundraisers, and lots of Republican events."
They also spent a lot of time with Angelo Ponte, the New York City garbage hauler who ran one of the city's biggest mob-connected commercial cartels before being sentenced to a two-to-six--year jail term in 1997. "The day the Pennsylvania organized crime commission books came out, which were that thick," he says to me, taking his hands off the wheel for a second and spreading his palms about eight inches apart to illustrate, "we just happen to have them. How does that happen?" he says in mock surprise. "So in my spare time, I'm looking up who's who. My boss and his brother are in there as the biggest money earners for the Genovese family."
Before a bad car accident sidelined him in 1994, Daubert chauffeured Sal Franco everywhere for 10 years. But after Daubert's back worsened, forcing him into a lengthy hospital stay, the family cut him loose.
Since then, his life has unraveled. His wife has divorced him, he's on disability, and he's convinced that the town landfill behind his house in Haverstraw, New York, has made him sick with asthma and other respiratory ailments. (Once a notorious illicit "midnight" dumping site for toxic waste in the 1970s and 1980s, the landfill has been closed since 1996; it was during this same period that authorities repeatedly accused Carmine Franco of illegal dumping at various area landfills, though Daubert says he's not aware of any such activity during his tenure with the Francos.)
His experiences have left him scornful of government and conflicted about his former employers. "When I did all this, I learned how the law doesn't work around these people, you know, the mob and politicians," he says. "Am I disgruntled? No. I love the family. They were good to me in a lot of ways, but did they do right by me? Absolutely not. Not for what I did. Garbage men made more than I did."
At 44, Daubert has had his nose busted eight times, and been arrested several times for fighting. Six-foot-four and 275 pounds, he still sports a lineman's build, despite a series of recent back operations that force him to move gingerly. But the former bar bouncer and mob bodyguard now dreams of a fresh start by going green. He speaks of going back to school--he has a high school equivalency diploma--to learn about law or ecology. "I would love to become an environmental advocate," he says. "I'm pissed the way they're treating us. They're destroying the earth--they're all being paid off."
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Conveniently, the Alliance landfill is located right off the interstate. But instead of driving straight there, I have Daubert drop me off at the next town over, Old Forge. There, I join a local resident, Mark Matylewicz, who has arranged an official tour for the three of us--me, him and his 9-year-old daughter, Kelsi--of what locals call "Mount Trashmore."
Halfway up the 250-foot-high mountain that is now a 600-acre landfill sits a small, bland visitors center. Alliance's community affairs coordinator, John Hambrose, meets us there. At once jokey and authoritative, Hambrose's spiel seems tailored to win Kelsi over. Several times throughout the one-hour tour, he will remind her to tell all her friends that they can visit the landfill anytime. "Kelsi," he asks, just before we walk out the door, "do you like trucks? Because we have lots of trucks."
His ploy is a smart one, because most adults in the surrounding community hate the landfill. One vocal and well-organized group in Old Forge helped defeat Alliance's application last year for a 150-acre expansion that would have extended the life of the landfill another 25 years. To turn the tide, Waste Management's response has been twofold: appeal the decision, which was handed down by Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection last May, and apply a full-court public relations press. A big part of the latter strategy involves Hambrose, a droopy, mild-mannered John McEnroe look-alike, sweet-talking residents at town meetings and events, and even going door-to-door. He offers free meals at the luncheonette located next door to the visitors center, along with a tour of the landfill it's perched on.
A former reporter for the Scranton Times, Hambrose first shows us a video that explains the "environmentally sound" operations of landfilling. After that, he pulls out several strips of rubber, each several inches thick, and has us tug on them to show how durable and strong they are. The materials constitute the three different landfill liners used to keep garbage juices from running down the mountain. Federal law required landfills in the early 1990s to start using high-density polyethylene, because landfills leaking toxic substances into the groundwater of surrounding communities. Environmentalists, however, point out that even the tough new plastic liners can be eaten away by common household chemicals found in trash: mothballs, polish, vinegar, alcohol.
When we step outside the visitor's center--the bathroom, I can't help noticing before we leave, has a shower stall--there's a fog rolling off the mountains, partially shrouding the landfill. Bulldozers and garbage trucks appear and disappear at higher elevations, in an ethereal procession. We pause momentarily at the methane recovery center, where gases emitted as the garbage breaks down are collected and converted to energy. Hambrose turns to me and says confidentially, "We get the gas out of the landfill, unlike a lot of other landfills." He's right: Many landfills don't capture any of the methane they generate. Of those that do, they only capture about 60 percent of it. As incinerator advocates like to point out, that makes landfills one of the nation's leading emitters of methane.
Aside from being a potent greenhouse gas, methane can be a serious health hazard for people living near landfills. Filtered through a landfill, it can pick up the volatile organic compounds that abound there--carcinogens like acetone, benzene, ethyl benzene, toluene, xylenes, trichloroethylene, vinyl chloride--and carry them into nearby homes and lungs. In 1984, authorities in West Covina, California, evacuated 19 homes near a landfill after finding explosive levels of methane and concentrations of other carcinogenic gases, including vinyl chloride, at up to 900 times government safety levels. In 1998, the New York State Department of Health published a study of 38 upstate landfills finding that women who lived within 250 feet of them had a four times greater chance of getting bladder cancers or leukemia than the rest of the population.
Blessedly, Hambrose doesn't linger long outside the leachate treatment center, where runoff garbage juices are stored and treated. The gag-inducing smell--imagine a hog farm overrun with sewage sludge--easily penetrates the car, even with the windows rolled up. Heading up the terraced mountainside on a narrow road, we see black turkey vultures loitering on the barren ground. "When they spread those wings, they look like 747s," Hambrose marvels. Staying on-message, he reminds Kelsi: "Don't forget, bring your friends anytime, and tell your teacher to bring the class. We have lots of wildlife--like foxes, birds, coyotes."
After cutting across one dusty road, we come to the current work spot, a stripped, muddy patch of earth, where incoming garbage is being mashed into the ground by bulldozers. Hambrose pauses at the site and we all watch in respectful silence for a few minutes. It is only when we head back down the mountain that I first notice all the houses in the distance below. To our immediate right, off to the side, I also see a line of sprinkler guns, shooting a fine mist. Hambrose tells me they are the odor neutralizers, spraying various chemical scents.
Before we leave, Hambrose hands us plastic gift bags containing a Waste Management coloring book, a set of Waste Management crayons and a pair of plastic Waste Management sunglasses. "Call me anytime you want to come back," Hambrose says, clasping my hand before I climb into Matylewicz' car. "Next time we can have lunch," he says, smiling, pointing to the small diner on the hill.
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Nothing makes Doug Pinnell madder than waking up to the smell of bubblegum. Or roses. Or lilac. Sure, he hates it when the fetid odors blow off the mountain behind his house, in the town of Taylor, a bedroom suburb just outside Scranton. Sometimes the stench is so overpowering that his two kids are driven out of the backyard on summer days. But it is the manufactured, force-fed scents that are the most insulting reminder of his powerlessness. "We don't get to choose what we want to smell," says Pinnell, who owns a mortgage company. "We have to smell what they want us to smell. What if I don't like bubblegum or lilac? What's wrong with the cut grass I just mowed?"
They, of course, are the owners of the landfill I just visited, which towers over Taylor and the neighboring township of Ransom. Alliance has a host community agreement with Taylor, giving it a minimum of $1.5 million a year (which helps keep taxes down), and a lump sum payment of $900,000 to pay for a new library and senior center. While the landfill has a similar agreement with Ransom, it has none with the neighboring township of Old Forge. "Most of the host communities give landfills space right on the border, so adjoining communities that get no benefits are the ones that have to deal with it," says Al Wurth, a professor of political science at Lehigh College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who chairs his state Sierra Club's solid waste committee. "These people have to look at the landfill and smell it every day, but they have no governing authority over it."
Even those who do get the benefits say it's not worth it. Pinnell and a half dozen other Taylor residents have gathered on Jimmy Cherundolo's doorstep to talk about the landfill that they say is ruining their lives. The hulking dump--which has reduced a large swath of the revegetated mountainside into a brown stump--is, literally, right in their backyards. "We can't have barbecues anymore--the smell comes down off the mountain and chases everybody inside," says Cherundolo, an engineer at the nearby Lockheed Martin plant who grew up in the area. Even if he and his family can stomach the odors, the landfill's resident birds--flocks of black, screeching starlings--often crash the party, sending everyone scurrying for cover. "I don't see any benefits," he says, estimating that the landfill had saved him maybe $3,000 over 14 years. "People spend more than that on coffee."
Over the last year, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PDEP) fined the landfill $115,000 for odor and litter violations. Two years before that, PDEP fined the landfill's previous owner $3.7 million for taking in, during the mid-1990s, 36,000 tons more garbage than it was permitted to. The Center for Disease Control's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry has opened a preliminary investigation into the landfill's gas emissions.
Cherundolo and Pinnell's complaints sound a lot like Cantelmi and Filiato's. "The most frustrating thing about this is knowing that the hundreds of trucks coming through here everyday are not even our garbage," says Pinnell, referring to the daily average of 5,000 tons of trash disposed of at the landfill. As the nation's number-one trash importer, Pennsylvania took in 12.4 million tons of trash last year, 92 percent of it from other states. (West Virginia runs a distant second, with 4.8 millions tons.)
Some states, including Pennsylvania, began imposing stricter environmental regulations on landfills and limits on future capacity in the late 1990s. But states' attempts to restrict garbage have run afoul of the constitution's interstate commerce clause; any restrictions controlling the flow of out-of-state garbage would take an act of Congress. Growing outrage from communities like Taylor has prompted members of Congress from Pennsylvania and West Virginia to submit numerous bills in Washington that would allow states to limit out-of-state trash.
But in trash politics, if you want to know who's really calling the shots, you follow the money. Since 1990, the waste industry has given more than $13 million in soft money and individual contributions to members of Congress and presidential candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Waste Management alone gave $359,200 to Democrats and $1,086,495 to Republicans between 1995 and 2001--and that's not including contributions to governors and state legislators.
Sometimes the campaign contributions came in kickbacks straight from the landfill. In 1999, former Pennsylvania state representative Frank Serafini pleaded guilty to illegally funneling $129,000 from landfill employees at Alliance (then known as Empire) to Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign. Serafini's family, which once owned the property the landfill was built on, still receives trash royalties from Waste Management.
Unlike kickbacks, host community agreements are perfectly legal. "Many of these townships have three rural, not terribly educated supervisors, and what it takes to turn the head of two out of three of these supervisors--well, it wouldn't be New York City standards, let me put it that way," says Wurth. "These places are sold out by their leaders, and they're sold out for pittances. We've seen a lot of communities where they vote to allow one, and the next year, [the townspeople] unelected them--but it's too late, and the newly elected people have their hands tied." Wurth's example is anything but theoretical: In Bethlehem, where he lives, the five-member community council voted 3--2 to privatize the town dump. One of the agreement's terms was that the community could not oppose any expansion of the landfill--ever. Although the deal's three champions have since been voted out of office, the town still can't challenge the landfill's expansion without risking a lawsuit.
For Cherundolo, the only hope now is the courts: With 14 of his neighbors, he's suing Alliance over their compromised quality of life. "I can probably forgive them for what they did in my lifetime," he says. "But I can't forgive them for what they're going to do to my children's lifetime, or my grandchildren's lifetime. What they did here is already done, but it has to be stopped from getting any worse."
Listening to Cherundolo and looking at the mammoth mountain of garbage behind us made me think of the first two axioms in Barry Commoner's 1971 book The Closing Circle: 1) Everything is connected to everything else, and 2) Everything must go somewhere. This is where my garbage goes, I thought--not all of it, but surely some of it.
I told the Taylor residents that their counterparts in Greenpoint and Williamsburg experienced a parallel indignity by living near a concentration of transfer stations, but that they thought the garbage was ending up far from a populated area. "I was thinking about that last night," Pinnell says. "Do the people of New York know that their garbage is going to our backyard? Maybe they should. Maybe we should ship ours to their backyard."
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A hundred years ago, political cartoons in the New York Herald featured the character "King Garbage," to illustrate what a mess the city faced with its voluminous trash. Until 1934, New York simply dumped much of it in the Atlantic Ocean. Since then, most of our garbage has been buried in large pits and swamps around the city--hence the term "landfill."
At the time, burning trash was a widespread practice, with nearly 30 incinerators operating around the city. Fresh Kills opened in 1948 as a "temporary" solution; it was to serve as a provisional measure for a few years, until newer and bigger incinerators were built. By the 1960s, there were 11 municipal incinerators as well as basement units in more than 17,000 apartment buildings.
In those days, incinerators spewed a toxic brew of heavy metals and ash into the air, and burning soon fell out of favor. In any case, incineration at its peak took care of only 39 percent of the city's garbage. So Fresh Kills remained open for another 50 years, ultimately growing to two-and-a-half times the size of Central Park and 225 feet high. By the early 1990s, anger on Staten Island began to boil over.
Then, in perfect storm fashion, two developments converged, leaving Mayor Bloomberg with the biggest waste disposal crisis in the city's history. First, Mayor Giuliani decreed the closing of Fresh Kills and banned any new landfills or incinerators from being built within the city. Around the same time, after breaking the Mafia's iron-clad, decades-long control of the city's commercial garbage market, Giuliani contracted with Waste Management and other corporations to haul off residential garbage, giving them an ideal foothold for moving into the city's newly de-mobbed commercial market. Combined with overall consolidation in the garbage industry, the resulting wave of buyouts led to today's monopolistic system--and skyrocketing costs. Over the past six years, the Sanitation Department's budget has nearly doubled, from $631 million to about $1 billion.
Last April, a few policy wonks, editorialists, and engineers posed incineration--also called waste-to-energy, because today's breed of incinerators generates electricity--as the way out of this impasse. Headed by Cohen, who is the director of Columbia University's graduate program in earth systems, science policy and management, they argue that the city's solid waste management should have its own municipal infrastructure, like the ones that exist for water and sewage treatment. "It's crazy that something this big should be held hostage to market forces," says Cohen. "Imagine if we had to rely on Perrier to get our water?"
But it's not just about the money. Cohen and others are arguing that incineration is also the more environmentally sound option. In December 2001, Cohen issued a report describing incineration as "environmentally preferable to landfilling." Mayor Bloomberg made it the basis of his short-lived incineration plans.
To Nickolas Themelis, director of Columbia University's Earth Engineering center and coauthor of the Columbia report with Cohen, it's a no-brainer: If you compare landfills with waste-to-energy from an environmental perspective, incinerators win, hands down. "For people that are environmentally conscious," he says, "I don't understand why they have aligned themselves against waste-to-energy."
Themelis points to a relatively new facility ten miles outside Cape Cod, Massachusetts, operated by American Ref-Fuel, to make his case. "There are no birds, no smell, and 50 landfills have been replaced by it," he says. "There is no question that waste-to-energy is the proper tool. Japan is using it. European nations are using it. Why is it that we are not?"
To some extent, we are. Though it's a small amount of the total, the city already sends 1,600 tons of its garbage every day to incinerators in Hempstead, Long Island, and Newark, New Jersey. On a typical day, 400 trucks come through the Newark facility's gates, dumping anywhere between 2,000 and 4,000 tons of trash. Of that total, 170 trucks, bearing 1,400 tons, come from Manhattan.
I arrive at Newark's American Ref-Fuel Incinerator on a typical weekday morning. If not for the dozens of garbage trucks stacked half a mile deep down the long driveway, you could easily confuse it for a convention center. Themelis and other advocates like to tout such pleasant architecture and snazzy landscaping as one of the industry's redeeming features.
"It's the morning rush," Jim White, the plant manager, yells to me over the rumble of bulldozers out on the "tipping floor." After coming across the weigh scales, trucks enter a 40-foot-high hangar, about the length of a football field, and "tip" their load onto the middle of a concrete floor. Bulldozers rush in and push the garbage into large piles, separating out the "bulkies," like the two ripped mattresses I see lying off to the side. White tells me the plant incinerates mostly household trash and "whatever gets thrown out in restaurants." Sticking out from the mound closest to us, which is about 15 feet high, I glimpse McDonald's wrappers. "We're looking at about 800 to 1,000 tons on the floor right now," White says. "Which isn't a lot, considering we take in a million tons a year."
From Alex Ingram's "crane cab," a booth with three big bay windows that look out onto a 95-foot high garbage pit, I watch the stacking, fluffing, and feeding of five days' worth of garbage into a boiler. Ingram tells me there's about 20 tons of garbage currently in the pit, and that the grappler can pick up to 10 tons at one time. An identical 12-ton grappler is operating on the other side of the
