Image credit: Erica Cirino

A Landfill’s Toxic Legacy

Nix used to work at the Brookhaven Landfill, and said that he was exposed to toxins on the job that caused his respiratory illness and mental health issues. As the landfill continues to expand, now covering more than 200 acres and surpassing 300 feet in height in some areas, the toxic impacts on the North Bellport community grow. Many of Nix’s neighbors have also faced serious health issues as a result of the landfill polluting the surrounding community’s air, land, and water.

At the Frank P. Long Intermediate School, which is situated at the base of the landfill, more than 30 staff members have been diagnosed with cancer, some of whom have died from the disease, since 1998. Recently, Nacole Hutley, the mother of a teenager named Javien Coleman who began attending the school in 2019 and sadly died from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2022, announced this year her intent to dozens of other plaintiffs in filing class-action and third-party lawsuits alleging the landfill’s harmful impacts on the local environment and the community’s health. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, an aggressive cancer of the lymph nodes, has been linked to exposure to chemicals emitted by landfills into the air, including benzene and trichloroethylene (TCE).

The community has witnessed the environment around them deteriorate as a result of the landfill’s growing presence. The landfill has long been leaking hazardous contaminants such as ammonia, BPA, iron, manganese, and 1,4-Dioxane into ground and surface waters through North Bellport; it releases noxious odors and toxic air pollutants such as acetone, benzene, toluene, and xylenes. The landfill’s layers of pollution and other commonly wasted materials also release greenhouse gases that warm the climate. 

Located on ancestral Unkechaug land, the Brookhaven Landfill was opened by New York State Environmental Facilities Corporation as a dumping ground for municipal solid waste in 1974. In 1976, the Town of Brookhaven assumed ownership of the landfill. In 1991, that changed when the Long Island Landfill Law required a phase-out of dumping such “untreated” wastes on groundwater recharge areas. So the landfill started to accept ash from Long Island garbage collected and incinerated elsewhere on Long Island, along with local construction, demolition and street debris, and for a period between 2010 and 2011, tens of thousands of tons of sewage sludge. Incinerator ash, however, is also hazardous, and is known to contain poisonous compounds such as dioxins, heavy metals, and PFAS “forever chemicals.” 

In 2021, BLARG obtained Suffolk County Department of Health Services documents under the Freedom of Information Law which found that private wells in their community tested positive for high levels of iron and PFAS in 2017. PFAS are a class of hormone-disrupting chemicals that accumulate in the environment and are linked to serious human health problems. PFAS are commonly added to plastics and other consumer items that are rapidly used and discarded. Despite this information, and knowledge of a groundwater contamination plume existing since the 1980s, it was only in August 2023 that the DEC ordered the Town of Brookhaven to assess and determine how to remediate the landfill’s toxic plume.

BLARG issued a press release after the DEC’s latest action calling for environmental justice for those living in proximity to the landfill. “We support the DEC’s acknowledgement, at last, of the landfill plume that was initially discovered in the 1980s. However, we do not understand why it took so long for the DEC to do its job in addressing an obvious and present threat to our groundwater and our communities.

“When you destroy the groundwater there’s nothing left,” said Hannah Thomas, another founding member of BLARG, who has lived in North Bellport for 55 years.

Image Credit: BLARG

There’s a long history of opposition to the existence and continual expansion of the Brookhaven Landfill by local civic and community groups across the area, such as the Brookhaven Village Association and parent-teacher associations; and environmental organizations like the Environmental Defense Fund and Sierra Club. BLARG is building on this activism by drawing attention to the urgent need to address the environmental injustice the landfill continues to create—specifically in North Bellport.

North Bellport by far endures the majority of the landfill’s pollution. And that appears to be intentional: Just years before the Brookhaven Landfill opened next to North Bellport in 1974, the hamlet that became North Bellport had undergone a dramatic racial shift. As a result of the discriminatory housing practice known as “blockbusting,” real estate developers used tactics to convince white working-class people to move out of neighborhoods rapidly so they could purchase houses at low costs, and sell or rent the houses to people of color at inflated rates.

Despite blockbusting being outlawed in the 1960s, this and other racist housing practices, the effects of redlining, and other forms of bigotry continue to segregate Long Island. It’s North Bellport and other communities of color that are disproportionately targeted for industrial development. Areas in and around North Bellport have been continuously targeted for expansion of the landfill, as well as other waste-related infrastructure, millions of square feet of shipping warehouses and trucking terminals, and numerous other polluting projects. All of this overwhelmingly works to put residents of the community in harm’s way of environmental hazards and health risks, and other impacts such as stressful noise and light pollution, and reduced property values.

In 2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), North Bellport had Long Island’s lowest life expectancy, at 73.2 years. This is 20 years less than the longest-lived census tract on Long Island, which is predominantly white. It and other low-income communities of color are disproportionately sought out for all kinds of polluting, industrial developments—such as shipping warehouses, waste transfer stations, and waste-to-energy facilities—on Long Island and across the country. This larger pattern of systemic racism, known as environmental injustice, has only recently been recognized “officially” on state and federal levels—despite communities affected by injustice having long spoken out.

“There’s no way to have a landfill without a toxic outcome,” said Thomas. “The location of this landfill was intentional. It all backs up to racism, that’s a fact.”

According to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), the landfill’s permit, which it renewed in 2021, is set to expire in 2026. The Town of Brookhaven has not, to date, published any concrete plan for closing the landfill—in 2024 or otherwise.

DEC Regional Materials Management Supervisor Syed H. Rahman said, “There is no set facility closure date specified in the DEC solid waste permit for the landfill.” Rahman added that the DEC did not impose the 2024 closure date previously cited by the Town of Brookhaven. Instead, this date reflects the Town’s projected closure date based on a grading plan determining the landfill’s total capacity as permitted by the DEC. “With a lower filling rate, it will take longer for the landfill to reach the permitted capacity, thereby extending its active life,” said Rahman.

Image credit: BLARG

The Town of Brookhaven and its representatives did not follow up our inquiries for more information regarding the extended landfill closure date they shared with The Long Island Advance. The landfill reportedly makes the town about $60 million a year in gross revenues. Meanwhile, Long Island’s “waste emergency”—the overwhelming amount of stuff Long Island’s population throws away with no safe place to put it—continues to grow. This, despite clear examples of how to end wastefulness upstream cropping up across the U.S. and internationally, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Kamikatsu, Japan. Municipalities are increasingly implementing zero-waste systems based on reuse, refill, repair, share, and regenerative practices aimed at eliminating production of single-use plastic and other materials, and the use of toxic landfills and incinerators.

Meanwhile, the Town of Brookhaven and State of New York have only proposed and reviewed projects that would perpetuate wastefulness, pollution, and injustice on Long Island and further afield. For example, this year the DEC issued a permit to Gershow Recycling Corporation to move forward with plans of a waste-by-rail transfer station that would receive and move construction and demolition debris from a site in Medford, which is part of Brookhaven, not far from the landfill. Among the proposed destinations for the debris is the Sunny Farm Landfill in Fostoria, Ohio, where people living nearby face polluted water, air, soil, and train car derailments. Construction and demolition debris may contain toxic heavy metals, as well as asbestos, which is known to harm human health.  

This year, longtime Brookhaven Town Supervisor Ed Romaine, a Republican candidate currently running for the role of Suffolk County Executive, has recently received campaign support from the sanitation industry, including a $50,000 contribution from Sam Gershowitz, founder and owner of Gershow Recycling. Gershow runs nine scrap yards in Brooklyn and across Long Island, including the Medford location. Winters Bros, another large sanitation company on Long Island, has also received support from the Town of Brookhaven in its efforts to build a waste-by-rail hub near the landfill, in Yaphank.

BLARG continues to pressure the Town of Brookhaven to create and adopt a solid waste management plan that is transparent, equitable, and sustainable instead of continuously pushing promises of closure down the road and implementing stopgap measures like waste-by-rail stations that perpetuate waste and injustice. The Town of Brookhaven’s previous plan, from 2016, identifies impending landfill closure, but lacks steps to actually shut down and remediate the landfill.

Meanwhile, North Bellport residents and members of the activist group BLARG continue to press local and state representatives for concrete answers, transparency, and a solid plan for eliminating waste and urgently closing the landfill—as they have been for decades.

“We are trying to build a relationship between our community and elected officials, to try to get the treatment we deserve,” said Nix. “What we need is a clean, safe place to live.”

BLARG and North Bellport community advocates continue to initiate real solutions, modeling the bigger-picture change necessary to address a key driver of pollution: the creation of waste. They have run a series of waste audits to better understand the composition of neighbors’ trash, and runs a composting program at its Chris Hobson and Bill Neal Memorial Community Garden to regenerate food scraps and feed neighbors. BLARG holds meetings and community events to share information, connect, and engage in efforts that support just, equitable zero-waste solutions. 

“Closed means closed,” said Thomas. “We need closure now. We needed closure yesterday.”

Image credit: BLARG