MONTICELLO, NY — For Sullivan County to get ahead of its trash problem, it will need to take all options under consideration.

That’s the gist of a conversation on the issue from the Sullivan County Legislature, and the subject of an upcoming public hearing.

Moving away from landfills

The way the world handles its trash will likely change in the coming decades. Americans throw out nearly 1,800 pounds of trash per person per year, according to a 2021 report “Trash in America: moving from destructive consumption towards a zero-waste system” from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). The United States as a whole created 292 million tons of municipal solid waste in 2018.

This vast amount of trash creates problems for the environment when it comes to rest in landfills—the methane gas it emits changes the climate, and its other emissions can pollute the water, the air and the land around it—and countries around the world have begun to reconsider landfills as a means of dealing with that trash.

Sullivan County is facing that reckoning on an accelerated timetable. It currently sends its trash to the Seneca Meadows landfill, and if that landfill doesn’t get a permit for expansion from the DEC, it will stop accepting new garbage in 2025.

What is the county considering?

The Seneca Meadows closure gives the county a two-year timetable to find an alternative.

At present, all options for dealing with waste are on the table, said Heather Brown, the county’s sustainability coordinator.

The county now has to pick through the available options, deciding which to keep and which to discard.

Some options will likely come off the table quickly.

“We’ve all agreed we don’t want to keep dumping stuff,” Sullivan County Legislature chair Rob Doherty said during a January 19 meeting.

The county could, in theory, find another landfill in another state to accept its garbage, but that’s expensive—Doherty has said it would triple the county’s waste-hauling costs—and it doesn’t solve the environmental problems that landfills pose.

Incineration is another solution that could come off the table quickly. Doherty told the legislature that in his research into trash management, he has found lots of incineration used, but he has remained nervous about the prospect.

Incinerators can themselves be harmful to their surroundings; the PIRG report says that the emissions from incinerators include “cancer-causing and highly toxic pollutants,” as well as heavy metals and mercury.

The community around Sullivan County’s landfill in Monticello is in a potential environmental justice area, according to the Department of Environmental Conservation; no one wants to be burning garbage there, said Brown.

Sullivan County county manager Josh Potosek, left, legislative chair Rob Doherty and clerk of the legislature AnnMarie Martin.

What’s on the table?

The final decisions on those alternatives and others remain for the county to make.

In the meantime, county legislators and officials are brainstorming ideas to keep the table well stocked.

Legislators contemplated a wide range of ideas at the meeting. Incineration could be part of the answer. So, too, may some kind of mandate on recyclable containers, moving the county away from plastic (though the legislature as a whole had little appetite for a mandate). Clear garbage bags could be part of the solution, providing a way to check that recycling wasn’t being mixed with trash.

Diverting organics to composting systems could reduce the amount of trash the county has to deal with, Doherty said. The county put $30,000 toward the purchase of organics containers in its 2022 budget, a pilot project that could build toward a larger composting initiative.

An alternate method for dealing with the county’s organic waste—a steam autoclave system proposed by the company Hughes Energy—is still on the table as well, Doherty told the River Reporter; “All options are on the table. We cannot eliminate one until it’s been fully vetted and compared to all options.”

“We don’t really have any answers, but we have options,” said Brown, who predicts that the next couple of months will see everything start to shake out.

Public hearing

The legislature agreed at its January 19 meeting that it wanted public input as well before it decided what options to pursue. It set a public hearing for Thursday, February 16 at 10:45 a.m.

“We need a solution, and we want the public involved,” said Doherty.