Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) landfills like Seneca Meadows, which are designed primarily for household and commercial waste, can pose significant environmental and health risks that are comparable to those of hazardous waste landfills.
This is because a significant portion of the “household” waste sent to MSW landfills is made from toxic materials, which, when decomposed in a landfill, break down into components chemically identical to those found in hazardous waste landfills.
It’s also because the EPA can’t even properly define a “hazardous” waste, according to Dr. G. Fred Lee, a preeminent Harvard-trained environmental research engineer, who said that
A simple proof of the hazardous nature of MSW landfills is the leachate they produce. A study issued by Texas A&M University in 1992 concluded that “the cancer risk assessment indicates that leachate from recently closed or currently operating MSW landfills receiving primarily residential waste are as chronically toxic as leachate from co-disposal landfills and hazardous waste landfills such as Love Canal.”
MSW landfills also are made toxic because the EPA has, over time, delisted (exempted) several classes of industrial wastes, such as incinerator ash, sludge, contaminated soil, and construction debris, even though they, in fact, harbor hazardous constituents.
Also, under federal law (RCRA Subtitle C) each "small quantity generator" (of toxic waste) can send up to 2,640 pounds per year of legally-hazardous chemicals to municipal landfills. (In 1980, the EPA estimated that 600,000 tons per year of legally-hazardous wastes were going to municipal dumps from 695,000 "small quantity generators.")
In addition, many “modern” landfills, such as Seneca Meadows, contain what are called legacy toxics, as they were permitted to be built adjacent to open dumps where all types of waste, including hazardous wastes, could legally be deposited in landfills before 1979.
This area of the Seneca Meadows landfill encompasses 26 acres and was classified by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (“DEC”) in 1983 as a Class II Inactive Hazardous Waste Disposal Site, and it is the area atop which Seneca Meadows is seeking a permit to expand their operation until at last 2040.
A landfill and its toxic constituents are a threat, effectively, forever.