In her book Garbage Land, Elizabeth Royte paints a gritty picture of New York City’s waste scene: “It isn’t just garbage that irritates the [transfer] stations’ neighbors. Six days a week, twenty-four hours a day, ten-ton packer trucks roll in with their deliveries—at some stations, more than a thousand of them a day.”
She notes that packer trucks are pollution powerhouses—second only to big rigs and buses—choking neighborhoods with the city’s “highest concentration of airborne lead” and the “second-highest rate of asthma” (emphasis added).
While, guess what? According to Seneca Meadows’ own Valley-Infill DEIS (p. 3-34), Seneca Meadows landfill saw a whopping 1,576 truck trip ends per day in August 2004. That blows past the numbers Elizabeth Royte cites in Garbage Land, where neighborhoods are already choking on truck traffic, lead pollution, and sky-high asthma rates.
And that’s before you even factor in the extra pollution from Seneca Meadows’ landfill itself and its so-called gas-to-energy operation.
So, what kind of air pollution do heavy-duty vehicles cause?
Most heavy-duty trucks on the road today are powered by diesel engines, which emit a mixture of harmful pollutants, including: