Just to be clear, Seneca Meadows (SMI) landfill is considered a “major source” of air pollutants, such that their pollutants (including CO, NOx and GHG) are regulated under the federal Clean Air Act.
(Major sources are categorized by having actual or potential emissions that meet or exceed the major source threshold for that location, which is 100 tons/year, and for “hazardous air pollutants” (HAP) it is 10 tons/year for a single HAP or 25 tons/year for any combination of HAP.)
Some of these pollutants—like CO and NOx—are also known as “criteria pollutants” under Title V of the Clean Air Act. They are called this because they are commonly found in outdoor air and may pose serious health risks to the public.
However, Title V does not address every type of pollutant, depending on how regulations evolve or which pollutants are prioritized based on scientific research, and it has little to say about emerging pollutants or those that have less established science regarding their impact.
The point here is that, In addition to some 85,000 synthetic chemicals in current use in industry (caveat, no one knows for sure how many), some 1000 new chemicals are introduced into commercial use each year, and comparitively few have been tested for their effects on human health or have basic testing data on their toxicity.
Many new industrial chemicals don’t have to be proven to be safe before they go on the market because they’re considered innocent until the public can prove them guilty of causing harm, which is to say by the time the EPA gets to them, they may have aready caused harm.
What this means in practical terms is a guarantee that people will be hurt before control can even be considered.
And that doesn’t include some 3.5 billion pounds of industrial toxins and 1 to 2 billion pounds of pesticides that are intentionally released in to the U.S. environment annually, according to the US EPA.
This is to say that your government has researched only a fraction of the hazardous substances in a landfill and, as has already been said, no agency or person has ever determined the synergistic and additive long-term impacts of individual landfill chemicals as they break down and possibly recombine to form even more toxic combinations, whether wind or liquid dispersed.
Note: Seneca Meadows generates, on average, over 100,000 gallons of leachate a day, and only a fraction of the thousands of chemicals in MSW landfills have ever been tested for their human toxicity. Many are not measured or regulated at all.
And many landfills and LFGTE facilities are not even required to report their most dangerous chemical constituent, dioxin (i.e., the NYSDEC does not test for dioxin out-gassing), the landfill flares of which, along with 18 combustion engines, exposes us to dioxin by-products.
And how much additional dioxin is "safe" in the environment? The EPA's answer seems to be zero. That is, when it comes to cancer risk: we would need to decrease by 300 to 600 times the amount we all now take in every day from “normal” environmental exposure.
Again, bad as the high amounts of known contaminants are, what is much worse is the vast number that have never been accounted for, their synergistic and ever-changing combinations, and your exposure to them, not just at one time, but continuously over a long period of time, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
In other words, any of the current testing for landfill toxins is woefully lacking and seriously flawed.
And there is like-wise no consideration given to the effects of these toxins on the most vulnerable, children, infants, fetuses, and elderly, those who already have medical conditions.
In 2006, Dr. Philippe Grandjean, a prominent environmental health scientist, spoke to the concept of continuous exposure using a new phrase called "chemical loading." He is quoted as saying, “a silent pandemic that has caused impaired brain development in millions of children worldwide” and “even if substantial documentation on their toxicity is available, most chemicals are not regulated to protect the developing brain. . . Only a few substances, such as lead and mercury, are controlled with the purpose of protecting children. The 200 other chemicals that are known to be toxic to the human brain are not regulated to prevent adverse effects on the fetus or a small child.”
More recently in the news is that the incidence of Cancer among younger people has increased substantially since the 1990s, with environmental exposure to air pollution thought to be a contributing if not major factor. Among the types of cancer listed are
See 2022 article, Is early-onset cancer an emerging global epidemic? Current evidence and future implications.