By Hildur Palsdottir
Winters Brothers Waste Systems, a Long Island company that collects our trash, recently issued a 2023 review of the solid waste crisis facing Long Island.
According to the report, our 2.9 million residents produce more than 14 million pounds of municipal solid waste each day. That’s a lot of garbage!
A truck reliably picks up my trash three times a week. But I couldn’t help but wonder what actually happens to it? Here’s what I found:
About 60% of Long Island’s waste goes to Covanta incinerators, less than 15% is recycled and the rest is trucked out of state for landfilling elsewhere. Covanta’s waste-to-energy schemes claim clean burning in a process that generates power. But I’m a biochemist. I couldn’t quite believe that burning my trash would transform it to energy with no environmental cost. Heavy metals and other toxins don’t just disappear.
Shockingly, I discovered that for every four tons of material incinerated, at least one ton is left behind as toxic ash that still needs landfilling. Most of that ash on Long Island is disposed of in a giant landfill in the Town of Brookhaven. The tragic reality is that communities of color are carrying the burdens of our consumption and paying with their health.
In North Bellport, original land of the Unkechaug nation, a community with the lowest life expectancy on Long Island lives next to the Brookhaven landfill. Less than an hour away from where I live, this community of mostly Indigenous, Black and Latin people have for half a century watched this controversial landfill grow to a height of 270 feet spanning 192 acres.
Every year, about 350,000 tons of incinerator ash is dumped at the Brookhaven landfill. The Suffolk County Department of Health Services has detected emerging contaminants PFAS, 1,4-Dioxane and other chemicals in nearby drinking water sources, and the state Department of Environmental Conservation has ordered the town to close this landfill because of the toxic plume coming from the landfill. But the people in charge claim that will take time.
Sick of broken promises and slow governmental action, local residents organized in 2020 as The Brookhaven Landfill Action & Remediation Group, a community-led coalition committed to exposing and rectifying the harms caused by this landfill. They are demanding climate justice. Meanwhile, officials from the Town of Brookhaven refuse to close the landfill, contending there’s still space for more incinerator ashes. North Bellport residents disagree: They don’t have space for any more health problems.
In nature nothing goes to waste, which is the motto for the Zero Waste movement. Monique Fitzgerald, co-founder of BLARG and a Zero Waste educator, says “the waste is the end result of what we have already done that was damaging.” If we followed nature’s principles, we’d have no waste accumulating. We’d be recycling everything.
But most of what people put into their recycling bin here in the Town of North Hempstead isn’t actually recyclable. At best, #1 and #2 plastics are down cycled or lose their value upon processing while shedding harmful particles. Please avoid “wish-cycling” plastics #3-7. Plastics other than #1 and #2 are incinerated in a process that generates toxic chemicals like dioxins that can cause cancers, developmental issues and fertility problems.
In the 2012 documentary “Trashed,” professor Paul Connett, author of “The Zero Waste Solution,” warns “the issue of sustainability is the single biggest challenge to our civilization.” The front cover reads: “How cities and towns around the world are saying no to incinerators and wasteful product design and yes to radical recycling, reuse entrepreneurs and the jobs they create.”
That’s right, job creation. Incinerators need few employees. Better reclaiming and recycling methods, on the other hand, not only save resources, reduce pollution and conserve energy, but importantly generate jobs. We should only be producing materials that can be efficiently recycled. We should insist that production of harmful materials, such as single use plastic packaging for food storage, be stopped.
San Francisco has pioneered best practices with an employee-owned Recology business, reclaiming reusable materials with the help of thousands of unionized workers. In the Port Washington School District, youth activists at Transition Town Port Washington have fought to get rid of single-use plastics in their school cafeteria. The school is eliminating single-use plastic water bottles and removing plastic wraps from certain foods. Kids get it – they know we have to eliminate plastics from the waste stream.
And why are we burning organic materials like food scraps? At least a quarter of our waste is food and should never be considered trash. At the Science Museum of Long Island community compost, almost 10 tons of food scraps have been converted into soil amendment in the last couple of years. This effort took root in the early days of the pandemic and has now grown into a community of about two dozen families who refuse to trash their food scraps. Similarly, at the heart of North Bellport you’ll find BLARG’s anti-landfill community composting collective next to the Chris Hobson Bill Neal Community Garden.
In the 2012 documentary “Trashed” narrated by Jeremy Irons, he warns: “The air is tainted with man-made chemicals and our oceans are turning into a toxic soup of floating debris.” Let’s turn this around. We’ve got no time to waste!
