By Dr. Robert Thorson
Here’s my remake of the song “America the Beautiful”:
O beautiful for spacious skies
For ever crowded lands
For purple landfills majesty
Above the flooded plain.
America, America
Junk shed its grace on thee
And crown thy goods with anti-brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.
This tune just keeps popping into my head, now that I know that the ultimate height of Hartford’s North End landfill is being debated. Also affected will be the 69 surrounding towns and cities that truck their waste there now.
Plainly visible from I-91 with its vortex of seagulls, this man- made mountain already captures enough sunlight at dusk and dawn to paint the horizon a deep bluish purple, the color of mountains everywhere.
The Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority — which runs the dump on land rented from the city of Hartford — is deciding whether to seek permission to increase the height of the landfill from its present legal limit of 138 feet to 188 feet. This decision will determine the shape of the North End skyline forever, will have a big impact on city finances and may redirect waste elsewhere, perhaps to a town near you. None of these choices are good ones.
The height of the landfill will be determined by two colliding forces. The economic force is the city’s desperate need for the $5 million in leasing and PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) fees it receives annually by having the dump there. The opposing force has two components. First is the inherent unfairness of continuing to dump trash from the suburbs into a poor urban neighborhood (an issue of environmental justice). Second is the impact of the dump on the natural environment, principally the permanent loss of wetlands on the Connecticut River floodplain, the brew of chemical leachates to surface waters and the smell of sulfur-rich gasses being exhaled every day.
Though it runs counter to my instinct as a scientist, I recommend that we plateau the landfill, principally for symbolic reasons. Closing, capping and revegetating the landfill at this time will also give us a head start on its conversion to usable space, perhaps as a strolling park with methane vents disguised as lampposts, or as a public ski resort for beginners, with a chairlift up the old haul road. A decision to raise the landfill even higher would expand its share of the horizon further out into the suburbs. Already, this visual environment is being blighted by new cellphone towers rising above the canopy like metal sequoias.
But at least each new tower signifies progress in telecommunications. A mountain-size Hartford landfill is less ugly than the sum of all cell towers. But a landfill signifies the unsustainable materialism and profligate waste of U.S. culture, as well as land-use inequality in the home of the free.
Consider a medical analogy. The cellphone towers are acupuncture needles jabbed into the skin of a forested patient with a good health care policy. The higher landfill is a bulky tumor on the paved skin of a patient waiting in line at a public health clinic.
If the decision is to allow the landfill to grow skyward, perhaps we could incorporate it into Hartford’s “Rising Star” campaign. If the decision is to stop it now, then we must prepare for two outcomes. First will be the shortfall in city revenue. Second will be a local NIMBY (not in my back yard) war over which town will get a new regional dump. If no site is permitted, then the bulky wastes will be exported out of the state, at even greater cost to us all.
There is only one good alternative: Cut back on the waste stream. So, the next time you finish a fast-food meal or unpack something you don’t really need, I suggest you pause to ponder whether your trash will be adding majesty to Hartford’s mountain or contamination to the watersheds of our lives.