Excerpt from Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Across the nation, environmental justice groups have sprung up to fight the siting of transfer stations, landfills, wastewater treatment plants, and other polluting industries within low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. According to a 1987 study conducted by the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice, three out of every five African Americans or Hispanic Americans live in communities with one or more unregulated toxic-waste site. These environmental justice groups track cancer and asthma clusters, educate their constituents, and work to clean up hazardous waste.

In my travels with trash I learned that more than two-thirds of New York City's residential and commercial waste flows through transfer stations in just two neighborhoods: the Bronx's Hunts Point and Brooklyn's Greenpoint-Williamsburg. (Altogether, the city has sixty-two land-based transfer stations, not one of which is located in Manhattan.) It isn't just garbage that irritates the 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. Altogether, they travel a total of forty thousand miles a day, trailed by a diesel plume of particulate matter. According to Inform, an independent research firm that examines how business practices affect the environment and human health, packer trucks account for only 0.06 percent of the vehicles on US roads, but they consume more fuel annually—and discharge more pollution—than any vehicles other than tractor-trailers and transit buses. Why do garbage trucks have such a heavy impact? Because they cover twice as many miles per year as the typical heavy-duty single-unit truck, and they travel less than three miles on a gallon of gas.

Greenpoint, home to sixteen waste transfer stations processing about a third of the city's garbage, has the highest concentration of airborne lead in New York City, and the second-highest rate of asthma. Epidemiologists link the disease with particulate matter smaller than two microns, the stuff that spews from the stream of packer trucks bringing garbage in, and from the tractor-trailer trucks that idle in a queue, waiting to haul it away.

Since Fresh Kills closed, almost all of the city's waste is trucked from transfer stations to out-of-state landfills and incinerators. According to Keith Kloor, reporting for City Limits, it takes about 450 tractor-trailer trucks to complete this task each day, burning roughly 33,700 gallons of diesel fuel. The combined round trips add up to 135,000 miles. An additional 150 packer trucks, carrying about fifteen hundred tons of waste a day, make shorter trips to three incinerators in New Jersey and Long Island. The trucks wear down city streets and outlying highways, and their emissions of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and other pollutants contribute to elevated asthma and cancer rates, acid rain, ozone depletion, and global warming.

The cost of shuttling city garbage around the boroughs and out of state is not cheap. In tolls alone, the city spent $2.25 million in 2002. Trucking and tipping fees cost another $248 million. Including the hiring of three hundred additional drivers to relay full trucks to transfer stations, the city spent $257 to dispose of each ton of trash in 2002, a 40 percent increase over the 1996 cost.
 

From Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte. Copyright © 2005 by Elizabeth Royte. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.