Tags Posts tagged with "Town of Brookhaven landfill"

Town of Brookhaven landfill

Town of Brookhaven Chief Deputy Commissioner of RSMM,Daniel Johnson; Commissioner of RSMM Christine Fetten; PaintCare Program Coordinator for Long Island, Sandra Torres Vera; RSMM Recycling Coordination Aide Zachary Sicardi and town Supervisor Ed Romaine. Photo from Town of Brookhaven

own of Brookhaven Supervisor Ed Romaine (R) recently visited the Residential Drop-Off facility at the Town of Brookhaven Landfill to announce the town’s participation in the New York State Paint Stewardship Program.

Operated by the nonprofit PaintCare and administered by the Town’s Department of Recycling and Sustainable Materials Management (RSMM), this program enables the recycling of architectural paints such as oil-based, latex-based and water-based paints, as well as stains, varnishes and lacquers.

The program, which is funded by a fee on the sale of paint, keeps thousands of gallons of paint from being improperly disposed of each year in the Town of Brookhaven alone.

The paint collected by the town is recycled to the highest extent possible, being remixed into recycled paint; used as fuel; made into other products; or safely disposed of when no other beneficial use can be found.

Brookhaven residents may bring up to 10 gallons per day to the Town of Brookhaven’s Landfill Residential Drop-Off at 350 Horseblock Road in Brookhaven. Hours of operation are Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. and Saturday from 7 a.m. to 12 p.m.

Many paint vendors have also signed up as paint recycling drop-offs. A map of all local drop-off locations and a complete list of acceptable items is available at paintcare.org. If you have 100 gallons or more of paint at your home or business, go to paintcare.org and submit a Large Volume Pickup Request form for free large volume pickup service.

Photo from Town of Brookhaven

On May 5, Town of Brookhaven Supervisor Ed Romaine, Councilman Dan Panico and Councilman Kevin LaValle were on-hand at the Brookhaven Landfill’s Residential Drop Off to launch the Habitat for Humanity Donation Program. Habitat for Humanity of Long Island has partnered with the Town to collect new or slightly used furniture, appliances, kitchen cabinets and building materials from Brookhaven residents.

The items collected will be sold at Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore to help build affordable housing for low-mid income families on Long Island. The ReStore is a nonprofit home improvement store and donation center whose proceeds contribute to the work of Habitat Long Island. Habitat partners with families to build strength and stability through safe and affordable housing. Items donated to ReStore are sold to the public to support Habitat’s vision – a world where everyone has a decent place to live.

Pictured left to right at the Habitat for Humanity (HFH) Drop Off are HFH Director of Marketing, Maggie Luna; HFH Donations Coordinator, Veronica Golio-Astarita; HFH Donor Relations Manager, Courtney Collins; Town of Brookhaven Department of Recycling and Sustainable Materials Management (RSMM) Commissioner Christine Fetten; CEO & Executive Director of HFH of Long Island, Lee Silberman; Supervisor Ed Romaine; Councilman Dan Panico; Councilman Kevin LaValle and RSMM Chief Deputy Commissioner, Daniel Johnson.

Habitat for Humanity of Long Island, Inc. is an independently operated affiliate of Habitat for Humanity International. Since 1988, Habitat Suffolk has empowered hundreds of families to achieve their homeownership dreams through its affordable home ownership program, building 5-8 houses annually. Recognized as a four-star charity by Charity Navigator, Habitat Long Island works in partnership with thousands of Long Island volunteers and responsible, lower-income families of all races, religions, and creeds, to build and renovate homes for those in need.

Starting on May 5, residents can drop-off items at the Town of Brookhaven landfill to donate to Habitat Long Island at no charge. Donations must be dropped-off at the Habitat container on-site. Residents can request an e-receipt for tax-deductible donation by texting DONATE to 631-525-5447. The Brookhaven Town Landfill is located at 350 Horseblock Road, Brookhaven, NY 11719. Drop off hours are 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Monday – Friday) and 7 a.m. to noon (Saturday).

Drop off items accepted Appliances (within 10 years old and in working condition); building materials (uncut and unused); doors and windows (within 5 years old); flooring/tile; furniture; kitchen cabinets; tools/hardware. For more information, please email [email protected].

A view of the Town of Brookhaven Landfill in Yaphank. Photo by Erica Cirino

By Erica Cirino

One recent morning, I drove my trash and recycling to my local waste transfer station in Connecticut. I had a single bag of garbage to dispose of, a large bin of recycling, and a few thick chunks of treated lumber leftover from the weekend’s project: building a set of wooden stairs up to my front door.

First, I dumped the recycling down one of two wide rusty metal trash chutes—clang, clang, clang! Down went a cascade of cans, plastic containers, crumpled papers, cardboard boxes, into the dark abyss below.

But what was below? I peeked around the enormous chutes—one labeled for recycling and one for trash—and I noticed each led to an open-topped shipping container meant to be transported by truck, train, or cargo ship. The lumber would go directly into another huge container. As I tossed the bag of garbage down the chute, I asked the attendant, “Where is all this trash going?” Clearly, it was headed somewhere.

“That recycling will go to another transfer station, and the garbage is going to be incinerated in Hartford,” said the attendant. “And the construction and demolition debris is shipped out of state…probably to a landfill in Pennsylvania or Ohio.”

Because “probably” didn’t sound too certain to me, I did some of my own investigating. What the attendant didn’t tell me was that the MIRA “waste-to-energy” incinerator in Hartford, Connecticut, which would burn my bag of trash, is located in close proximity to predominantly low-income Latinx and Black communities—which bear the brunt of the incinerator’s pollution burden.

The average person living in the United States creates about five pounds of trash daily. Little trash—especially plastic trash—is actually recycled, compared to how much we waste. This, though recycling and managing waste is exactly what industries and corporations selling consumer stuff tell us to do with items we are done using, and governments have long supported and encouraged it. Recycling sounds good, after all, and hypothetically if materials are reused, they’re not wasted. Right?

Wrong. Instead of being recycled or going “away”—as we expect once we haul our waste to the end of our driveways, or to our local transfer stations—our waste is most often used as a tool of oppression. It is sent somewhere else to become someone else’s burden, at the hands of waste haulers and handlers that operate in contract with municipalities and are supposed to be regulated by the government. Usually, that someone else being harmed is a person of color, an Indigenous person, a person with a low-income, or a person living in a rural community.

Trash, and the serious systemic injustice it drives, has profound effects on the physical and emotional health, finances, and futures of people living on the fencelines of transfer stations, railways, roadways, incinerators, landfills, and other trash-disposal infrastructure in underserved communities in the U.S. and worldwide.

Burning plastic and other waste is a fully toxic operation. Not only do incinerators or open burn of trash release greenhouse gases, they also emit toxic heavy metals, dioxins, particulate matter, and other dangerous substances linked to health issues like cancer, organ damage, and asthma. Then the dangerous ash from these incinerators must be dealt with: it gets dumped into landfills and ponds, causing further contamination of human communities and the natural environment we need to survive.

I learned that the scraps of lumber I’d tossed would be trucked or carried by rail from Connecticut hundreds of miles into rural and low-income parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio—where it is dumped into enormous, poorly-contained landfills.

Landfilled plastics leach toxic chemicals, including hormone-disrupting PFAS and phthalates, and these chemicals have been frequently found in drinking water. That’s because landfill liners are not made to last forever; and are often also made of plastic. Liners leak and tear, contaminating soil and groundwater; older landfills have no liners at all. Landfills emit huge amounts of climate-warming greenhouse gases, expose people to noxious odors and toxic gases, attract nonstop diesel-dump truck traffic, can spread diseases, attract nuisance animals, and reduce home equity.

With so much flammable and tightly compacted garbage crammed together, the trash trains and trucks are very prone to catching on fire. And they do, with catastrophic consequences. These vehicles are loud, large, fossil-fuel thirsty, and wretchedly smelly. They’re poorly contained, sometimes completely uncovered, and often lose trash into nature and neighborhoods as they travel. The U.S. has also historically paid money to ship trash overseas, primarily to China and nations in the Global South—though those countries that used to accept our trash are increasingly turning it away as attention is drawn to the injustices of waste colonialism.

Do you know where your plastic and other waste goes when you throw it away, or toss it in a recycling bin? Few of us are able to name exactly where our trash goes when we bring it to the curb or a local transfer station. We are frighteningly disconnected from our waste—and that disconnect enables people with wealth and power to take the trash we create and use its pollution to fuel widespread racial and class injustice near and far.

It is long past time to recognize that pollution is injustice, and that in the U.S. and around the world, entire neighborhoods are being—and many have long been—overtaken by trash, trash infrastructure, and the myriad forms of pollution that having to deal with too much trash causes. There is no such place as away, and recycling is far from the clean, green cure-all we’ve been taught. Just ask those living on the front lines.

This Earth Day, I urge you to look past quick fixes and false promises, and take a hard look at the truths behind what we waste, and think about why our world needs to waste less. Consider the impact your trash has on others; read more about environmental injustice and take action by standing up for the respect and protection of those communities worst affected by waste—and demand accountability of those people and systems who drive pollution and injustice.

Author Erica Cirino

Author Erica Cirino is the Communications Manager of the Plastic Pollution Coalition. She has spent the last decade working as a science writer, author, and artist exploring the intersection of the human and nonhuman worlds. Cirino is best known for her widely published photojournalistic works that cut through plastic industry misinformation and injustice to deliver the often shocking and difficult truths about this most ubiquitous and insidious material.

This includes her recent book, Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis (Island Press, 2021), in which she documents plastic across ecosystems and elements; shares stories from the primarily Black, Brown, Indigenous and rural communities that are disproportionately harmed by industrial pollution globally; and uncovers strategies that work to prevent plastic from causing further devastation to our planet and its inhabitants.

Brookhaven Town Landfill. Image from Google Maps

By Lisa Scott and Nancy Marr

Planning and decision making in our county needs to be a more open, thoughtful process. There is a concern on the part of communities in the area surrounding the Brookhaven Town Landfill that the plans for closing it in 2024 are unclear and have not been fully disclosed to the public. 

The League’s March 2021 TBR column on zero waste (https://tbrnewsmedia.com/making-democracy-work-how-can-we-get-to-zero-waste/) set the stage … our goal is to significantly reduce our garbage, but we are far from getting significant action from our neighbors (and our consumer/disposable society) in the next few years. Thus, what the Town of Brookhaven (TOB) does with the landfill site, the surrounding area, and the ash disposal will be a major factor for central Suffolk residents in the coming years. 

The TOB landfill was established on vacant land zoned mostly residential in 1974. Hamlets, developments, neighborhoods now surround the landfill site, including the areas of North Bellport and Horizon Village. 

Looking ahead to the closing of the landfill, TOB officials have proposed changing the zoning of 136 acres on the landfill site from residential to light industry and selling some of the land for an industrial park, with a codicil to prevent certain waste-related uses. (The remaining acres include the municipal recycling facility and yard waste and composting operations and undisturbed woodland.) 

At the zoning hearing held by the TOB in July, residents from all parts of the town protested the plan to sell the acreage and suggested instead that the town seek community input about how to remediate and re-purpose the entire landfill property. Clearly information is required about possible contamination of water and soil and the testing results over the past 50 years (think of the Bethpage and Brookhaven Lab plumes). 

The League is focused on civic education and government transparency. We urge the TOB Supervisor and Board to THINK BIG! The problems and possible solutions to the landfill closure, possible pollution, health effects and ash-disposal are just one part of a proposed ongoing discussion. 

Appointing a sustainability committee could lead the TOB toward better understanding of the problem and solutions and lead a community education effort. The town needs to communicate the issues openly with the public and hold public listening sessions to get constituents’ input. Garbage itself, and its costs in dollars, health, property values, and yes, our children’s future, MUST be described and garbage volume reduced significantly. If the landfill is to close in 2024, time is of the essence. Everyone should have the opportunity to be heard.

In a time of contentiousness and public strife, it’s critical that government brings its citizens/residents into the tent and that accurate, thorough information is the basis. The people must be heard, and decision-making must be transparent and accessible. The Town of Brookhaven owes this to the people who elected them and placed their trust in these representatives. 

Lisa Scott is president and Nancy Marr is vice-president of the League of Women Voters of Suffolk County, a nonprofit nonpartisan organization that encourages the informed and active participation of citizens in government and influences public policy through education and advocacy. Visit www.lwv-suffolkcounty.org or call 631-862-6860.