Lawmakers to Hochul: Shut down NY's largest landfill. Why they say there's no time to lose
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The heads of the state Legislature’s environmental conservation committees are pressing Gov. Kathy Hochul's administration to reject a Texas company’s bid to expand the Seneca Meadows landfill, New York’s largest, and let it shut down as planned next year.
In a letter to Hochul, State Sen. Pete Harckham and Assemblywoman Deborah Glick cite the toll air pollution and runoff from dangerous chemicals have taken on northern Seneca County, where state health officials have identified a cluster of lung cancers.
“It is important to take action now to minimize the already dire health and environmental impacts caused by this landfill,” the Democrats write in a letter obtained by the USA Today Network. “Expansion is just not a viable option for that community and for all of us in New York State.”
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Texas-based Waste Connections is petitioning the state Department of Environmental Conservation to allow it to use another 47 acres of the 350-acre landfill to dump garbage and increase the landfill’s height by 70 feet.
The DEC will issue a decision on the petition in the coming months.
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Seneca Falls debates whether landfill is source of jobs or state's dumping ground
Seneca Meadows takes in 2 million tons of municipal waste annually — mostly paper, plastic and food scraps — at a rate of 6,000 tons a day. Nearly three quarters of what ends up there comes from New York City, which no longer has a landfill, as well as the city's suburbs in Rockland and Westchester counties and Long Island.
The landfill’s towering mounds of garbage and distinctive odors have become a lingering source of irritation in Seneca Falls, located in a Finger Lakes region transformed by wineries and weekend travelers in recent years.
Seneca County sits in an 11-county region that his home to six of the state’s 25 municipal landfills.
And so the debate over Seneca Meadows’ future has become a piece in a larger effort to reverse the region’s image as the state’s dumping ground.
Leading the opposition is the environmental group Seneca Lake Guardian.
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Its vice president, Yvonne Taylor, said Hochul should be mindful of Seneca Falls’ legacy as host to the first women’s rights convention in 1848, which led to women gaining the right to vote.
“She can allow this landfill to keep trashing the birthplace of women’s rights and what a horrible legacy that would be for the first female governor of New York State,” Taylor said. “Or she can heed the leaders of her state who are now publicly speaking out against the expansion of this landfill and shut it down once and for all.”
Both sides have squared off at Seneca Falls town board meetings last year, with proponents defending the landfill as a reliable source of jobs in a region that needs them, as well as a source of property tax revenue. Waste Connections has pegged the landfill’s local economic impact at $72 million annually.
A spokesman for Waste Connections could not be reached for comment.
The DEC is reviewing some 600 comments received last year as it develops an environmental impact statement on the project.
“DEC will continue our aggressive oversight of this facility and continues to subject every application to a rigorous review of all applicable federal and state standards to ensure its decision is protective of public health and the environment, upholds environmental justice and fairness, and meets applicable standards, including those related to the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act,” a spokeswoman said.
DEC is no fan of landfills
DEC commissioner Basil Seggos has said he wants to reduce the state’s reliance on landfills, one of the largest contributors to the greenhouse gas emissions the state is trying to reduce. And, to relieve the pressure on landfills, he wants to improve the state’s recycling rate to 85% by 2050.
That won’t be easy, with the current rate around 20%, a level it has been at for decades.
More than 80% of the state’s 18 million tons of waste goes to landfills and incinerators or is shipped out of state.
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Harckham and Glick are backing measures that would limit waste that ends up in landfills by requiring companies to reduce the amount packaging they use, known as Extended Producer Responsibility.
“The reality is we’re running out of landfill space in New York State and we just can’t keep shipping our garbage to other people all the time,” Harckham said.
They’re also pushing a measure that would create incentives to reuse glass bottles.
“We have to find ways to reduce waste and move industry towards operations that refill and reuse,” Glick said. “When I grew up the dairy dropped off bottles in our little insulated aluminum box by the back door. And then we left the empties and they took them back….The bane of our existence has been the expansion of plastic.”
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Letter to Hochul: Shut down Seneca Meadows, NY's largest landfill
