Listen to this articleA panel of waste management experts presented a grim picture of the challenges and rising costs facing municipalities and property owners over Long Island’s mounting garbage crisis.
The event titled “This Panel is Garbage,” hosted by the Commercial and Industrial Brokers Society of Long Island (CIBS) Thursday in Melville, focused on the projected fallout from the looming closure of the Brookhaven Landfill and new state fees and taxes that will impact towns and building owners.
Panelist Pat DelCol, deputy market director at H2M architects + engineers, said once the Brookhaven Landfill closes in about three years, Long Island will need to find another way to dispose of construction and demolition (C&D) waste. Also, the state is looking to add fees onto trash processed at waste-to-energy plants and charge at least $5 per ton as a waste disposal disincentive fee next year to encourage recycling.
“We’ve got a bunch of issues,” DelCol said. Though the state is under a 2 percent tax cap, it is “able to meet its budget through these fees instead of raising taxes.”
Panelist Martin Belew, commissioner of the Town of Islip’s Department of Environmental Control and president of the Islip Resource Recovery Agency, said with the closing of the Brookhaven Landfill, Long Island could have “a couple of hundred thousand more trucks on the highways” to transport trash off the Island.
“In New York City, waste can only leave by rail or barge,” said Belew, who oversaw the closure of the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island when he served as the director of the New York City Bureau of Waste Disposal. “It’s problematic if each town (on Long Island) has to handle its own waste.”
Moving trash off Long Island by rail is a growing practice, with a little more than 10 percent of the Island’s solid waste now moved that way. There are three existing facilities that ship waste by rail and another four currently being proposed. But Belew added that the rail system on Long Island isn’t ideal and because the trains must travel to upstate Selkirk before heading to out-of-state landfills, the roundtrip takes more than 10 days.
But there is also opportunity, as trash is turned into cash in a couple of ways.
“Recycling is one of the solutions we rely on to manage solid waste,” said panelist Will Flower, senior vice president of Winters Bros. Waste Systems. “Each person on Long Island generates an average of 5.02 pounds of garbage per day, which adds up to about 14 million pounds daily. Between 15 and 20 percent of that gets recycled in some way. It’s the fastest growing part of the business.”
As another source of revenue, Long Island’s waste-to-energy plants generate electricity which is currently sold to the Long Island Power Authority for $79 a megawatt. DelCol said the waste-to-energy facility that serves the towns of Huntington and Smithtown provides $16 million a year for those municipalities, though the power purchase agreement with LIPA expires in 2027 and will need to be renegotiated. By comparison, Belew said that the state set a price of $150 a megawatt for power generated by offshore wind facilities because that’s classified as renewable energy while the waste-to-energy plants are not.
As for solutions to the garbage crisis, the panelists suggested that there should be a multi-pronged approach, which includes waste reduction, an enhanced transportation system, support for incineration and more reuse and recycling.
“There’s no magic bullet,” Flower said. “You have to use every tool in the toolbox.”
Meanwhile, panelist Gary Schacker, a principal at United Realty, said property owners and businesses will be paying a lot more for waste disposal, which may become the primary motivation for change.
“My concern is the impacts that this will have for the business and real estate communities because they pay the bulk of the taxes,” he said. “I think we have a big problem coming down the pike. People need to be conditioned (to reduce waste and recycle). They’ve got to feel the pain.”
