The day I visited Seneca Meadows, it was cold and blustery. Waves of gulls fought against the wind as they dove for food scraps. Fugitive plastic grocery bags fluttered against the windscreen the workers had set up in that day's active area, the only part of the landfill that actually smells and looks like what it is, the final resting place for what we as a society no longer want or need. By sundown, the day's dumpings would be tamped down and tidily covered with six inches of sand and gravel, adding one more increment to the geometric mound, which has a legal height limit of 280 feet.
"People like to say bad things about landfills, but other than my family's share, I don't make the trash," said Don Gentilcore, the landfill's general manager. We sat at a large, wood-trimmed conference table in the Seneca Meadows office a few hundred feet from the landfill itself, which stretches high and wide at the edge of the town of Waterloo.
"I make sure the trash is handled in the best way possible," said Gentilcore. An environmental management graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology, he interned at the landfill before becoming employed there and working his way up through the ranks. He's proud of the way the landfill, which is Seneca County's fourth largest employer, is managed these days.
The facility's legacy will always be present, in the form of now-closed sections. In 1953, a true "dump," unlined and virtually unregulated, was opened there by the Tantello Corporation. Thirty years later, when the Tantello site was closed, surrounding ground water was contaminated by the ooze that leached out of what was basically a big hole in the ground where everything and anything had been tossed. According to Gentilcore, a $22 million clean-up of the original site was undertaken by the purchaser, Seneca Meadows Inc., which was permitted by the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to start another, more modern landfill next to the old one.
The second site, lined with compacted clay, high-density polyethylene and gravel, became one of the first regional landfills. When it opened, most communities, Tompkins County included, operated their own landfills. In recent years, small municipal dumps have closed in favor of much larger facilities. When the second site at Seneca Meadows reached its legal height, it was capped, and in 1999 a third site was started. The third site, which covers about 100 acres, meets all current DEC regulations but is reaching the end of its lifetime, with five years left on its permit. A fourth site has been proposed.
The current site is lined with clay, high-density polyethylene, and layers of rubber tire chips made at the landfill's own tire recycling plant. It is laced with pipes that recover landfill gas - methane - produced from the decomposing materials. The methane is used to produce electricity at an adjacent, independently-owned utility plant. Seneca Meadows buys back enough electricity for its own operations, and the plant sells the rest to the grid. Leachate , the liquid that seeps through the layers of dirt and garbage, is captured and recirculated through the landfill to further break down the materials and produce more gas.
Last week, Seneca Meadows announced plans to build a landfill gas-powered "renewable resource park" on acreage opposite the main site. The first tenant of the park will be a hydroponic tomato grower that will reportedly build 20 acres of greenhouses, using electricity and waste heat from the landfill gas power plant. Other enterprises may use new agri-business technologies and food operations, such as cold storage for apple and cabbage growers that will help maintain the local markets.
Raising our trash-consciousness
The "closed loop" innovations at Seneca Meadows help mitigate its overwhelming presence as a burial mound for society's unwanted cast-offs, and with hundreds of trucks bringing waste from as far away as Massachusetts and Connecticut, its business vitality seems assured. According to the parent company, IESI Corporation, Seneca Meadows' annual revenue is in the neighborhood of $48 million.
"Do you think Americans throw away too much?" I asked Gentilcore, wondering how he felt about the raw material that feeds the business' bottom line.
"Absolutely," he said, "and a lot of it's out of our control. I bought a portable CD player recently. It fit in the palm of my hand but it came packaged in so much plastic and cardboard, it was ridiculous. I didn't want all that stuff; all I wanted was the CD player."
Susan Strasser, author of Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, writes that we discard things to rid ourselves of excess - for example, too many zucchinis or gifts of crocheted bedspreads - but the more common motive for throwing something out is "simply because we do not want it."
"Nothing is inherently trash," Strasser declares. The boundary between trash and non-trash is the threshold of our front doors. Once we've left it at the curb, it's forgotten. It's the rare person who visits Seneca Meadows or another regional landfill to see what happens - or doesn't happen, because much of what is put in landfills does not decompose - to what they throw away.
Strasser points out that in less prosperous communities around the world, as in this country's past, material items were and are more highly valued for their current and potential use. These people also acquire items more thoughtfully to begin with. In this country and others, she writes: "We buy things devised to be thrown out after brief use; packaging designed to move goods one way from factories to consumers, and 'disposable' products, used one time to save the labor of washing or refilling."
You could say that Tompkins County is an exemplar of trash-consciousness. We recycle, compost, re-use, and trade stuff like crazy. In 2003, the most recent year for which figures are available, 41 percent of the tonnage delivered to the county's Recycling and Solid Waste Center was recyclable material. Along with a ton of batteries and fluorescent light bulbs and 70 tons of obsolete computer equipment, 34 tons of paint, pesticides, and other toxic materials were collected for safe disposal. In addition, an estimated 2,200 tons of food waste and 3,000 tons of yard waste were home-composted; a youth group refurbished and distributed 233 computers for re-use; and 72 tons of architectural and building materials were rescued and sold.
Still, on an average winter day, the center packs two to four tractor-trailers with the non-recyclable detritus of our daily lives and sends it to Seneca Meadows. In summer, four to six trucks are loaded with our garbage. Superior Disposal Service, a private trash hauler based in Newfield, collects and exports about twice that much locally-generated garbage every day.
A week after my trip to Seneca Meadows, I was sitting in a church basement with about 80 other Ithacans listening to a talk by Maura Stephens, who lives in nearby Spencer. A former Newsweek editor, Maura, and her husband, George Sapio, made a humanitarian trip to Iraq just before the war. She presented devastating facts and photos of the consequences of ongoing conflict in that country. Faced with the realities of the war-related environmental and humanitarian decline of a once relatively prosperous country, my concerns about too much trash in Upstate New York seemed trivial. But one of Stephens' comments show that it's all connected.
In reference to the dominance of American economic and corporate interests in war-ravaged Iraq and elsewhere, she asked the audience: "Do you believe Americans deserve to be better off than everyone else in the world?" Fortunately, we weren't really expected to answer - but bloated and gassy landfills are an apt metaphor for our country's excess and sense of entitlement.
Cutting Back
It should embarrass us that we fuel trucks to deliver our detritus to places like the misnamed Seneca Meadows, where at best it will persist in a semi-decomposed state for decades if not centuries. Our own personal collection of orange rinds, sanitary pads, Styrofoam peanuts, disposable diapers, plastic razors, plug-in room deodorizers, promotional CDs, meat scraps, blister packs, burned-out light bulbs, moldy cheese, date-expired yogurt, used paper towels, non-recyclable containers, ribbon, broken toys - the list is almost endless - gets heaved into the back of a truck, dumped onto a tipping floor, packed in another truck, driven through the countryside, weighed, dumped in a landfill, and buried in dirt, where it will partially rot but largely remain intact and recognizable for decades.
Cutting back on the quantity and type of landfill-bound trash is called source reduction. Composting food waste is an excellent source reduction technique. Re-use is another. Being a wise buyer is perhaps the most difficult but most important habit to cultivate. Manufacturers and sellers need to understand that we don't want excess packaging and un-recyclable materials. We need to make conscious choices to buy long-lasting items and to eschew the vast array of retail junk that ends up in the garbage can.
Strasser's book, which details various cultural trends away from thrift, simplicity, and repair, ends on a note of hope. "We are not likely to revive the stewardship of objects and materials formed in a bygone culture of handwork," she writes. "But perhaps new ideas of morality, utility, common sense, and the value of labor - based on the stewardship of the earth and of natural resources - can replace it."
Skinner is communications co-chair of Sustainable Tompkins and environmental writer for the Ithaca Times.
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