1,500 Tons of NYC Trash Every Day—For Another 15 Years?

In January, nine-year-old Leo Mull stood up at a Seneca Falls Town Board meeting and told his neighbors what he thought of the local landfill: It stinks.

"I smell it all the time," Mull said of Seneca Meadows, a landfill which some locals have dubbed "Mount Trashmore." 

"When I am playing soccer outside with my friends, I smell it. When I am swimming in our pool, I smell it. When I am playing with our dog, Cheerio, I smell it, too. I worry about what this smell is doing to our lungs and our environment." 

Seneca Meadows is the largest landfill in New York and the state's largest emitter of methane, according to one recent study. In 2016, the town board passed a law to shut it down at the end of 2025. 

But these new boardmembers, some of whom were elected with the help of donations from the landfill's owner, the Texas-based Waste Connections, were weighing whether to reverse course, and allow Seneca Meadows to keep operating for another 15 years.

"I am making this speech because I am hoping the landfill closes at the end of this year," Mull pleaded.

Two months after the 4th grader's remarks, the board voted 3-2 to allow Waste Connections to keep Seneca Meadows open through 2040. Mull left the vote in tears.

Now, the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) is considering whether to rubber stamp the board's decision and approve the 15-year extension, which is crucial if Waste Connections wants to keep Seneca Meadows fat and profitable—the 400-acre landfill takes in 6,000 tons of trash a day, including 1,500 tons from New York City. 

Meanwhile, the landfill's opponents argue that Local Law 3, the town ordinance that requires the landfill to shut down this year, is still on the books, and they're waging a legal battle to ensure it's enforced.

The landfill fight in Seneca Falls has become a flashpoint for the state's failure to live up to its lofty goals to combat the climate crisis—and a glaring example of how New York City has struggled to reduce the staggering amount of waste that flows out of the five boroughs.

"New York is falling behind on achieving our climate mandate," Hillary Aidun, a senior attorney at the nonprofit environmental law organization Earthjustice, told Hell Gate. "The state needs to step up, and we need to take very seriously how we manage our waste and make sure that we are not continuing to overburden the same communities that have borne the brunt of waste and resulting pollution for decades."

The town of Seneca Falls, which was the site of the country's first women's rights convention, sits in the bucolic Finger Lakes region, and is home to wineries, apple orchards and other forms of agrotourism. Vinny Aliperti, co-owner of the award-winning Billsboro Winery, started his business in 2007, about seven miles from the landfill, back when it was promised to close and was "much smaller." Now, he said the hundreds of trucks rumbling by his vineyard each day are straight out of "Mad Max."

"The trucks are huge, they're covered in muck and dirt and grime, belching diesel, extremely noisy," Aliperti said. "And they carry the smell with them."