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

grapes went into jams; watercress from freshwater tributaries made salads. In 1929, the Crystal Water Company began bottling and selling springwaters that meandered down toward the sea. Zimmer noted great numbers of pheasants, crows, marsh hawks, black snakes, muskrats, opossums, rabbits, rats, and field mice.
    By 1951, when
The New Yorker
published Mitchell’s story about Zimmer, the city had already filled in five of the “once lovely” clay pit ponds at Greenridge, on the dump’s southern flank. “The marshes are doomed,” Mitchell wrote. “The city has begun to dump garbage on them. It has already filled hundreds of acres with garbage. Eventually, it will fill in the whole area, and then the Department of Parks will undoubtedly build some proper parks out there, and put in some concrete highways and scatter some concrete benches about.”
    The current nudged us toward shore, and Alderson raised his binoculars. “Ring-billed gull,” he said. “Canada goose. Great blue heron. Geotextile lining.” He aimed his paddle at a scarf of exotic black lying against the brown of Section 6/7. The high-tech tarp was part of Fresh Kills’ final closure plan, a barrier that was supposed to keep rain from the garbage and provide footing for future soil and vegetation.
    When the EPA began examining landfill impacts in the 1980s, it adopted the “dry tomb” philosophy of landfill construction, which focused on isolating garbage from its immediate surroundings. New landfills, the agency said, would have liners that protected groundwater from leaking garbage juice; collection pipes to funnel this juice into treatment plants; methane-collection pipes to vacuum the gases created by biodegrading organic material; and, when it was time to close the landfill, some sort of plastic layer that would act like an umbrella and keep rainwater from percolating through the waste. Dry garbage, went the argument, was inert, quiet, and calm. Wet garbage, engineers knew, would generate leachate for thousands of years: the dumps of the Roman Empire, more than two thousand years old, are still leaching today.
    But there’s one problem with dry-tomb landfills: plastic covers and plastic liners break. It is widely acknowledged, including by the EPA, that even the best plastic will ultimately leak, and well before the waste it contains ceases to threaten the environment. How long does waste pose a threat? According to G. Fred Lee, an environmental engineer who’s devoted his entire professional life to the study of landfills, “For as long as the landfill exists.”
    And so in recent years, a new philosophy of waste has edged its way into civil and biological engineering circles. The so-called bioreactor method is just the opposite of the dry tomb, calling for leachate to be collected and then repeatedly injected back into the garbage. All this moisture accelerates decomposition, so that bacteria feeding off waste produce more gas more quickly. After the fermentation of waste has stopped, the dump contents are rinsed with fresh water, and the toxic runoff is collected and treated before final discharge. Because the garbage shrinks while it decomposes, the landfill settles and stabilizes faster (while monitors are still keeping an eye on things, it is to be hoped). Landfill managers like the idea of this method because they don’t have to collect and continually treat their leachate. But because there is a lot more of it cycling through their dump, there is more liquid to potentially leak. Leak-detection liners do exist, but they are very expensive and, said Lee, “No one uses them.” While university scientists in biological engineering departments are busily running wet-tomb bioreactor models in bins outfitted with Plexiglas windows, the EPA is monitoring long-term experiments on four actual bioreactor landfills in California, North Carolina, and Virginia.
    “Another problem with bioreactors,” said Lee, who actually favors the wet method,