080413 Atop Trash Mountain

There was a time when Albany, New York appeared to be cutting edge in taking a forward thinking approach to waste removal. Remarkably bad planning and thirty years worth of surrender to the status quo have brought the city the edge of ecological and financial catastrophe. In the depths of the nightmare that was the Carter years and with energy crisis of the seventies still in the news, Albany came up with the ANSWERs plant. Its purpose was to take the solid waste from the cities of Albany, Cohoes, Rensselaer, and Watervliet, the towns of Berne, Bethlehem, Guilderland, Knox, New Scotland (including the Village of Voorheesville) and Westerlo and the villages of Green Island and Altamont. It would then cleanly incinerate the waste and produce energy to power the expansive Empire State Plaza.

To place the plant close to the state offices and to keep real estate costs down, the plant was sited in the poorest neighborhood in the city inhabited almost exclusively by a minority population. Then, rather than use the newest technology, expenses were saved by using older incineration techniques. This of course resulted in a polluting, possibly cancer causing burning facility sitting amid the housing for the region’s most disadvantaged. There was, of course, a public outcry – and rightly so. The plant was doomed to a relatively short life.

West of the city lies the Albany Pine Bush Preserve. It is, I believe, the last pristine inland pine barrens in the world. Adjacent to this ecological treasure is the Rapp Road Landfill which the city has operated since 1969. With the closing of the incinerator, ANSWERs went into the landfill business in a big way. The Rapp Road Landfill has expanded and grown in every direction including up. Now operating under the name “The Capital Region Solid Waste Management Partnership”, it covers two hundred and fifty –five acres and takes in approximately one thousand fifty tons of garbage a day. That is two million one hundred thousand pounds of garbage or seven hundred sixty-six million, five hundred thousand pounds a year. Albany is only a small city.

The Rapp Road Landfill has run out of ways to expand. Sometime next year it will be full. ANSWERs has come up with proposals to try and maintain its existence. These have met lawsuits. The fact of the matter is, the city needs to rethink its position on what to do with garbage. The city, however, is addicted. The government is addicted to the cash the landfill generates. The people are addicted to living in a disposable world.

The result of living in a society which creates so much trash is obvious by taking a walk though the pine barrens and veering off of the approved trails. Over the hill, plastic shopping bags fly from every branch of each of the scrub pines like flags to Wal-Mart and target. The ground is buried in waste. The landfill itself is a towering mountain dwarfing everything around it and it fails to contain so much of what is carted in.

As a people, we need to look at the type of lifestyle we lead that creates so much trash. Do we really need to pre-slice fake processed cheese and individually wrap each of the slices? Not to tip my hand, but that is the stuff of another blog.

The power needs that Albany has have done nothing but increase. The energy that this mountain of trash could generate is needed more than ever. If built properly, an incinerator need not be a polluter. It can certainly create less pollution than the coal plants that currently generate the power bring about. It is time to uncover the mountain and shovel the rotting trash into the fires of industry, or use it to power my laptop. After threatening the Pine Bush for the last twenty years, it’s time its land was reclaimed and made part of the preserve.