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Does environmental justice for New York
City mean more garbage for North Carolina?
The following Op-ed appeared in the September 11, 2006 print edition of Waste News.
It is reprinted here with permission.
Does environmental justice for New York
City mean more garbage for North Carolina?
David Mickey
While New Yorkers were putting the final touches on their
long-awaited Comprehensive Solid Waste Management Plan, North
Carolinians were debating the consequences of new mega-dumps and
the possibility of becoming the country’s next big importer
of solid waste. The New York City Council formally adopted their
new plan on July 19. A few days later a twelve-month moratorium
on new landfills passed the North Carolina General Assembly.
Appeals for environmental justice played a major role in the
passage of both measures.
After the closing of the Freshkills Landfill in 2001, trucks
hauling garbage to incinerators and landfills outside the city
clogged the streets and polluted the air. Waste from the more
affluent neighborhoods moved disproportionately through the less
affluent boroughs on its way out of town. The Comprehensive Solid
Waste Management Plan sought to address these inequities. For New
York City, environmental justice means sharing the burden of
waste transportation equally in all of the boroughs.
 David Mickey
But a less polluted New York City comes with a price that will be
paid in other communities. The New York City Independent Budget
Office explains the economics of building new barge and rail
waste export facilities as a way to reach “more distant-and
cheaper-disposal sites.”
Communities in North Carolina could be among those “more
distant-and cheaper-disposal sites.” The implications for
the state’s future prompted the twelve-month moratorium
legislation and the establishment of study commissions on solid
waste and environmental justice. North Carolinians can expect
frequent reference to New York City as our state examines its own
solid waste policy and the impact of waste imports.
North Carolina is very familiar with the questions surrounding
environmental justice. Activists fought for twenty years to get
North Carolina to clean up the state’s PCB landfill in
Warren County. In 1991 when North Carolina tried to site a
low-level radioactive waste dump, a public relations firm was
hired to conduct a confidential survey of locations that were
politically suitable (powerless). The process backfired when the
report was made public. Ironically, two rural communities,
Marston and Hoffman, listed over a decade ago in the Epley Report
figure prominently in current attempts to locate a landfill in
North Carolina that would receive 5000 tons of garbage per day.
New York City and North Carolina are both faced with issues of
how to deal with their waste. New York City’s solution is to
send it out of state, possibly to North Carolina. The ultimate
destination will be determined more by the economic interests of
upstream waste generators than the environmental justice concerns
of “more distant-and cheaper-disposal sites”
downstream.
North Carolinians can expect to hear a lot over the next twelve
months about state of the art liners, bioreactors,
waste-to-energy economic development, and other justifications
for mega-dumps. But the stigma attached to garbage will still be
in the containers leaving New York City on trains and barges. New
Yorkers who struggled with their Comprehensive Solid Waste
Management Plan already understand that. Perhaps they found
environmental justice in their plan to transport garbage through
the city, but they did not seek justice outside of New York. Now
those questions must be asked and answered in North Carolina.
David Mickey is the Zero Waste Coordinator
for the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League.
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