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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.

City Limits Magazine


November 2002:
Top of the Heap

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