Albany's So-Called Landfill Crisis.
Albany's plans for expanding in the Pine Bush and dumping trash in Coeymans are wrongheaded.
May 16, 2006.
I oppose both Albany's planned expansion of the Greater Albany Landfill into the Pine Bush and Albany's C-3 plans to build another garbage dump in the wetlands of Coeymans Creek next to the Hudson River and LaFarge cement. While the later is probably preferable to the prior, it seems both proposals would have significant negative effects on the Capital Region environment.
There was a time when every town their own garbage dump. It used to be relatively easy to comply with the laws regarding garbage dumping, by doing simple things like not burning muncipal dumps and covering them with dirt to keep the rats and flies down. Nowadays with increased concerns with pollution and the fact that nobody wants to live near a garbage dump, it seems that places for dumping household trash are getting farther and farther inbetween. Only Colonie and Albany still have their own garbage dumps.
Albany doesn't really need to have their own garbage dump as plenty of towns and cities across New York State seem to do without, instead disposing of their garbage on the free-market by hauling it some other dump that's looking for garbage and the associated revenue to fill. That would raise the cost of garbage disposal, but would also encourage smart ways of minimizing waste.
Big Producers: Let Them Figure It Out
Like it or not, construction debris (maybe 20%-30%) and waste from state government (around 22%) is the biggest things that go in the Rapp Road landfill these days. All of the household trash in the city only equals about 9% of the waste, plus another 5-6% from nearby towns and maybe 2-3% from private haulers from apartment buildings.
Both the State of New York and the Construction industry have lots of money so they can find places to dump there garbage elsewheres. Both of these industries already engage in a far amount of recycling and waste reduction, but they could do more. Without a handy dump nearby they will be forced to look elsewheres.
Ship It Elsewheres
There are plenty of garbage dumps out there in New York State that are willing to take people's garbage if they are willing to ship it out to them. Many of them are cheaper then the $75/ton that Albany charges. People might think exporting garbage is expensive and impratical until they realize that New York City exports all of there trash and there is only one garbage dump and three incinerators in all of downstate New York.
Nobody really likes garbage dumps, and certainly the people who have to live near garbage shipped in from far away aren't particularly happy. Yet, shipping garbage does add costs and forces industries to think about more local disposal for their trash. There are dumps that already exist to put garbage in, so why must we create new ones? We have plenty of capacity in existing dumps in New York—at least 10 years assuming that we don't export any trash out of state or build and expand any existing dumps.
Real (Small) Problem: Jobs and Finances
Albany only cares about having a garbage dump for two reasons: it provides a limited number of jobs and revenue for the city. The jobs the dump creates is several dozen and the revenue has been quoted around $13 million or about 10% of the city budget. Mayor Jennings with his staff hve been making a lot of hay of this point despite the fact it's not that major of a problem.
Many of those jobs will still be need to exist through the closing of the City dump and even after there to monitor the landfill and restore it back to parkland. People will still have to pick up trash from the streets of Albany. The city claims that costs them roughly $2.3 million a year, a small fraction of the whole city budget.
Revenue-wise the city gets a lot of money from tipping fees. Yet, a garbage dump is a big liability. Closing the Rapp Road Landfill in the next few years will cost the city millions of dollars, and maintance of the facility into the long future could be very costly despite all the methane that's beening burned for energy. Nobody really knows what will be leaking of the dump in a few years and need to be cleaned up.
