Pennsylvania at the Top of the Heap

Pennsylvania at the Top of the Heap

by Karla Vierthaler

Imagine if you lived on a nice street in a nice house with a lovely front yard. Imagine if you had neighbors, who seemed nice enough, until one day they began throwing all their trash onto your front lawn. Soon, your lawn is covered with garbage that isn’t even yours. Suddenly, things don’t seem so nice any longer.

You’re Pennsylvania. New York, New Jersey and Puerto Rico are your neighbors.

Pennsylvania is the number one importer of out-of-state trash in the United States. In fact, Pennsylvanians produced less than half — 48 percent — of the trash that fills our 50 landfills. We import trash from 28 states, and from Puerto Rico and Canada.

How much trash are we talking? In 2000, 12.2 million tons of out-of-state trash was dumped in our landfills. According to the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), that amount of trash indicates a 20 percent increase from 1999, an unprecedented increase.

Every minute, over 40,000 pounds of garbage is dumped into a Pennsylvania landfill. Every minute, 30 garbage trucks unload on Pennsylvania soil.

What’s the deal? “The trash industry is a captive industry; in other words there are only so many places you can put it, and naturally the waste industry is going to put it where it’s more available, more accessible and more profitable,” says Representative Camille “Bud” George, chair of the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee. Landfills are privately owned businesses, making trash a commodity.

It makes sense; Pennsylvania has an abundance of rural land compared to states like New York and New Jersey. And New York closed its last landfill in March of this year. Nearly all the waste generated in New York City is sent to Pennsylvania or Virginia, which means that the bulk of the daily 13,000 tons of trash produced by the biggest city in the county goes on our soil.

What’s worse is that the trash isn’t just apple rinds and candy wrappers; it’s also biosolids and sludge. According to George, New York ships its biosolids to Pennsylvania because regulations won’t allow it to be dumped in the state.

So we’re getting tons and tons of garbage put into Pennsylvania ground that isn’t even ours, and to make matters worse, the waste industry would love to give us tons more.

And Showing No Signs of Stopping
The numbers are shocking: every second, 6,000 pounds of trash are chucked on Pennsylvania land. The DEP currently has 25 pending permits for the expansion or building of a landfill. If approved, the permits would bring another 71.5 million tons of trash to our Commonwealth. Although Pennsylvania has the capacity for 12 more years of garbage at the current rate, trash is big business and everybody wants a piece of the action.

“They don’t plan on stopping anything,” says Representative George, “It’s a big money maker for the contributors and the receivers.”

Trash is a Dirty Business
This April, DEP launched Operation Clean Sweep, the largest environmental enforcement in our state’s history. The target: garbage trucks. For eight days, 500 DEP officials did surprise inspections of the garbage trucks dumping their trash at each of Pennsylvania’s 50 landfills. The result: 86 percent of garbage trucks were in violation.

DEP found 11,000 total violations on the inspected trash trucks, most issued for safety and environmental concerns. Some trucks were even removed from service during Operation Clean Sweep.

Jeff McCloud, DEP’s deputy press secretary, said the enforcement was organized because “the waste industry is not getting the message that their trucks need to be safe. Trash trucks are coming in, using our interstates and roads, and they need to be safe.”

Camille George has been in the State House since 1976 and environmental chair since 1983. “I’m not a fanatic; I’m just the environmental chairman,” he says. George has made public statements urging state agencies such as DEP to do more to keep trash trucks up to code. “When 86 percent of trash trucks inspected over eight days in May are cited for safety and environmental violations, the blame falls not only on the trucking and waste industries, but also on the agencies that are supposed to be overseeing them.

“The Pennsylvania State Police don’t need urging to place some of the fine troopers on the road to stop regular transit traffic, to make sure you have a up-to-date license, to make sure you qualify by the rules and regulations of the road, to make sure that your car has the latest inspection. Why do we have to make such a fuss over the fact that you have trucks coming that that are overloaded, not properly inspected, not safe for the highway, bring in material that could be damaging and placing it in our ground?”

George says garbage trucks have been found with infectious waste hidden in the middle of their regular load. Other trucks have repeatedly been denied access to Pennsylvania landfills for low-level radioactive waste, and yet continue to dump their trash in the Keystone state.

The Effects of Trash?
So Pennsylvania is inundated with trash — who cares? It goes into a landfill and eventually gets buried — what’s the big deal?

Health, yours and mine, could be the big deal. “What is going on with the environment? It doesn’t take a lawyer to be able to interpret the Constitution of Pennsylvania where the people have a right to clean air and water,” says George. “They ought to be looking into the reasons some our people are dying of cancer, are these matters contributed to air borne disease, which you can get from the landfill, waterborne disease which you can get from the peculation of the penetration of some of these bad materials in the landfill that go into our aquifers.”

Money, yours and mine, could be the big deal. Municipalities receive a $1 per ton fee from the waste industry and 25 cents per ton for a closure fund, a saving to aid in the closing of a landfill. Local governments hosting landfills receive $1.25 per ton of waste deposited, but they also carry the burden of wear on the highways and roads from trash trucks and possible run-off problems. Tractor-trailers make 600,000 trips into Pennsylvania each year loading and unloading trash. “Removing waste costs twice as much as putting it in there,” says George. “Once the closure fund is gone, it’s the local government that has to clean it up.”

He also points out that the Governor’s Growing Greener plan allows communities to raid the closure fund and use it for open space preservation. Chris Novak, DEP press secretary says that a bonding requirement is part of the permit process to open a landfill, meaning operators are required to pay for the closure of the landfill. But, those are the initial closing costs, which do not factor potential problems that may come down the road.

Cumberland County has a landfill closed 20 years ago that is still plaguing the local government with run-off. “It’s been closed twenty years and they’re still paying for the damage it’s causing,” said Matt Maciorkoski, George’s press secretary.

Potential problems are scary to consider. Trash isn’t clean, and it doesn’t get any cleaner when biodegrading.

Even scarier is an incident that occurred in 1994. Eleven-year-old Tony Behun of Osceola Mills died eight days after playing in what was found later to be sludge. Although Behum’s death was not been blamed on waste run-off, the boy was found to have died from an infection of Staphylococcus aureus, a pathogen that DEP identifies as posing a public health threat from biosolids.

When Is Enough Enough?
Everyone at the statehouse from Governor Ridge to Representative George wants to put a halt on Pennsylvania’s trash problem, but doing it is easier said than done.

Why can’t our legislators just pass a law telling the waste industry to keep their trash out of our state? In 1989, the courts told Pennsylvania to stay out of the way when it came to trash; a moratorium limiting expansion and building permits for landfills was rejected in violation of the Interstate Commerce Act, a law that forbids states from interfering with interstate commerce. Remember, garbage is a commodity.

What are Pennsylvania’s options for stopping or at least slowing the constant flow of trash onto our land? One is to impose a moratorium to halt permit approval for landfill expansions and establishment.

There are two bills that may be introduced to the floor of the Pennsylvania House and Senate this fall, House Bill 1436 and Senate Bill 814. Although the bills mirrored one another initially, the amendment process has turned the bills into near opposites. The House bill went through 17 amendments, and includes a moratorium and gives DEP expanded power to nap hazardous trash trucks. The Senate Bill does not include a moratorium and has the approval of the landfill industry.

If the bills are introduced when the Pennsylvania legislature reconvenes in late September, their fate will be determined by the GOP, which holds the majority in both the House and the Senate.

Governor Tom Ridge has called “meaningful landfill reform,” a priority of his administration. The Ridge administration has repeatedly given support for a moratorium, but his party has yet to determine their stance on such legislation.

What Now?
“The people are going to have to rally, they’re going to have to say enough is enough,” says George, when asked what can be done about Pennsylvania’s trash problem. “We are indeed responsible for handling the waste we generate, but we shouldn’t allow it to be a captive matter where it makes several big companies multibillion-dollar conglomerates while we’re left with a hole filled with material that could endanger our citizens.”