Free Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte

there was plenty of room out there, what was the incentive to conserve space?
    In 2002, thirty-two states (reporting to
BioCycle
magazine) imported garbage from other states, while twenty-four states exported garbage to other states (some states did both). Pennsylvania led the importing pack, accepting ten million tons in 2002. In second place came Illinois, followed by Virginia, which shipped its own hazardous waste primarily to dumps in Ohio and New York State. The second-largest exporter was New Jersey and the first was New York, which had contracts to dump its garbage at thirty-seven landfills in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania (with permits to dump in Ohio, Virginia, and South Carolina if need be), in addition to four incinerators in three states.
    Before it closed in 2001, Fresh Kills had been the largest city landfill in the country, indeed, in the entire world. That honor is now held by the Puente Hills Landfill, in Whittier, California, which has a permit to accept twelve thousand tons of trash a day from the surrounding counties. Not to belittle Whittier, but that’s just half the daily tonnage that was dumped into Fresh Kills, which sprawled over three thousand acres on the western side of Staten Island.
    I’d requested permission from the city’s Department of Sanitation to visit Fresh Kills because it played such an important role in New York’s garbage history, but my application seemed to be in limbo (much like my request to visit IESI’s Bethlehem landfill). I asked Sanitation one more time for a tour of Fresh Kills, then took matters into my own hands. Studying a map of Staten Island, I made out a green-tinged area just north of the dump. In fact, it seemed to be connected to Fresh Kills by a tidal creek. I’d never heard of the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge, but it seemed like a good place to start.
    “Do you have a boat that I might be able to rent?” I asked the receptionist at the refuge. I implied that I was interested in the area’s native grasses. No, she said, the refuge didn’t keep rental boats, but the resident naturalist, Carl Alderson, knew a lot about the grasses. Without waiting for my response, she patched me through.
    I was getting a bit off track, but I liked talking to Alderson. He was refreshingly warm and friendly. A salt marsh ecologist, he had restored wetlands in the Arthur Kill, which separated Staten Island from New Jersey, after a big Exxon oil spill in 1990. (The word
kill
is itself a sort of historical debris. Dutch for
river,
it remains, despite the conquest of the English, scattered throughout the New York area, from Fresh Kills to the upstate towns of Fishkill, Peekskill, and beyond.) Alderson was studying salt grasses on New Jersey’s Raritan River, and he’d completed a three-acre marsh restoration inside Fresh Kills itself. My ears pricked at this news: now we were getting somewhere.
    We talked a little about the effect of garbage on the environment, and then Alderson revealed that he had four canoes, a kayak, and a Boston Whaler at his disposal. He asked if I wanted to give him a hand counting spartina grass stems in a week or two at the Raritan site. Sure, I said, trying to temper my enthusiasm. To get to New Jersey, I figured, we’d have to boat right past the landfill.
    We set a date for fieldwork, but early that morning it rained. We rescheduled, and once again got rained out. Weeks passed, the weather didn’t improve, winter closed in. Alderson’s spartina grass had wilted, and I knew he couldn’t count his stems until next spring. I was about to give up on seeing Fresh Kills from the water when, one weekend in the middle of December, the telephone rang.
    “Come on,” said Alderson. “Let’s paddle around the landfill.”
    “Okay,” I said, fist raised in silent triumph.
    It was 25 degrees and the sky was leaden by the time I met Alderson at the refuge office. With his square chin and snub nose, and in his dark fleece jacket and jeans, he