There's gold in them thar fills: New York City Garbage Raises a Stink Upstate

[mahatmakanejeeves]

TRI-STATE AREA

New York City Garbage Raises a Stink Upstate

Grass-roots group mounts legal challenge against landfill operator over train-hauling trash business

High Acres Landfill received about 568,000 tons of trash from New York City by rail last year.

By Kate King | Photographs by Gabrielle Plucknette for The Wall Street Journal

https://twitter.com/KCarliniKing

Aug. 27, 2018 9:00 a.m. ET

PERINTON, N.Y.— Gary McNeil grew up playing baseball on fields next to a landfill here and said he never smelled the garbage. Now, at his home about a mile away, he consults an app that forecasts wind direction before inviting family and friends over for cookouts. ... “Any event you want to have outside, you should check to see which way the wind is blowing,” said Mr. McNeil, 38 years old, who is president of a financial-services company.

Residents in this western New York town along the Erie Canal have lived in the shadow of High Acres Landfill and Recycling Center for nearly 50 years. The smell wasn’t a problem, they said, until trains started bringing in trash from New York City about three years ago.
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The lawsuit is a recent example of the city’s struggle to dispose of its large quantities of waste, often transported by rail to faraway places. Last spring, residents in Alabama held their noses after 200 shipping containers full of sewage from New York City became stranded en route to a landfill. The sewage rotted on the tracks for months, prompting outrage from nearby residents and forcing city officials to stop sending sewage there.

High Acres has been accepting trash from the city by long-haul truck for 20 years, according to Waste Management. In 2014, the company spent $22 million building a rail spur connecting the landfill to a nearby railroad, and trains began bringing in trash the following year. The lawsuit alleges the odor problems started shortly afterward. ... The landfill received about 568,000 tons of trash from the city by rail last year, about 48% of its total waste intake, including construction debris, asbestos and other materials, according to Waste Management. Previously, trucks delivered up to 220,000 tons of garbage annually from the city.
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New York City has been hauling away all of its trash since Fresh Kills on Staten Island closed in 2001. The city now exports the more than 3 million tons of trash that city sanitation workers collect each year to upstate New York, Virginia, New Jersey, South Carolina and Pennsylvania.
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Write to Kate King at [e-mail]

CSX, for one, makes a pile of money hauling trash. I see the trash train go through Alexandria, Virginia, all the time. I thought the landfill that is the subject of this article was served by Norfolk Southern, but it seems that it is served by CSX as well.

Rail fans in Fairport understand the call of the tracks

David Andreatta, @david_andreatta Published 10:00 a.m. ET Oct. 31, 2016
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Rail fans live to witness extraordinary moments on the tracks. Circus trains, for instance, are really something to see. Recently, the gang glimpsed a train hauling wind turbine propellers. That was quite a find.

On this day, there are no such moments. Track work west of Mile Post 361 in Fairport is slowing train traffic through the village, and the ones that pass are of the garden variety loaded with nondescript boxcars.



A mother and son watch as a CSX train stops to pick up a crew member along the train tracks in the village of Fairport. (Photo: MAX SCHULTE/@maxrocphoto/, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)

They rattle off the names of the shipping lines that own the containers. They notice the length of the skeleton cars carrying them. They point out the containers affixed with boxes that beam their precise location and temperature to a satellite orbiting the planet.
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[e-mail]

[CatMor]

1. Recently drove by the landfill...

it was very unpleasant to the nose. I feel for the people living there.

[TreasonousBastard]

2. Many New Yorkers remember following this story...

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/trash-fight-long-voyage-new-york-unwanted-garbage-barge-article-1.812895#

The tugboat Break of Dawn was one of hundreds of modest working vessels that plied the waters off the U.S. East Coast during the year 1987, and this was just another job: hauling a 230-foot-long bargeload of 18-foot-high commercial garbage from New York to North Carolina.
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Every day, New York City routinely exported 25,000 tons of garbage that its landfills no longer had room for. Most of it was trucked overland hundreds of miles to landfills in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and other places. Whenever costs and location came together to make a sea voyage feasible, the stuff went out on a barge like this one, the Mobro. Skippered by Capt. Duffy St. Pierre, the Break of Dawn left the pier at Long Island City in Queens on March 22.
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Where was the garbage going to go? Just in case the Break of Dawn figured it could perhaps slip into Mexico, the Mexican government dispatched two naval vessels and a number of aircraft to keep an eye on the tug's course. The military of the Central American nation of Belize was ordered to put the barge and its cargo under surveillance too. The Bahamas also said no.

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6,000 miles later, the barge ended up back in Brooklyn, where the waste was incinerated.

[WhiteTara]

4. I do remember this. Oh what a nasty mess that was

I can see it becoming even more common in the future--not even distant.

[c-rational]

3. Good article and post. We supposedly live in a free market society. What are the true costs

for our consumption and are they being paid fairly - No. We, supposedly educated Americans can be such an ignorant lot. Note, I was the project manager for the Yonkers Dewatering Project, to stop dumping sewage sludge in accordance with the Ocean Dumping Ban Act of 1987. Will we ever learn. Capitalism needs regulating and we best wake up quickly.