Dennis Nix sat across from the Brookhaven Town Board, gripping a zip-lock bag on his lap.
He joined about a dozen of his neighbors in North Bellport — and supporters with the Brookhaven Landfill Action and Remediation Group (BLARG), which he helped to start — to urge the town to close one of the last remaining waste management facilities on Long Island.
The facility accepts garbage from over 2 million people on Long Island, neighboring his community.
“As a former employee, I no longer work in the town of Brookhaven. I used to work at the Brookhaven landfill. This is what my daily medication looks like,” Nix said, lifting a bag of dozen pill bottles he takes for diabetes, respiratory conditions, and mental health.
“How many more people in our community need to suffer from the landfill before something gets done?” he asked.
Nix and more than 25 other plaintiffs have brought lawsuits alleging the landfill is having a detrimental effect on the environment and public health. The latest notice of legal action in January comes from the parent of a student, Javien Coleman, who died in 2021 from cancer believed to have been related to toxic exposure of going to middle school near the landfill.
A spokesperson has said the town doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
Town Waste Management Commissioner Christine Fetten told WSHU that the town spends over $3 million per year for engineering consultants and state-required monitors to ensure “there is no adverse impact from this waste management facility on the environment or our residents.”
Moving to zero waste
At the meeting, residents called for the town to consider adopting a zero waste management plan before the landfill closes in the next few years. Zero waste strategies avoid sending trash to landfills or incinerators through reusing and repurposing products.
Fetten said the town “is continuing to move forward in implementing zero waste solutions, expanding recycling, advocating for Extended Producer Responsibility legislation and urging the State of New York to provide a comprehensive regional waste plan for Long Island.”
Monique Fitzgerald, a North Bellport resident and a member of BLARG, emphasized to the town board that keeping the facility open would endanger their community’s health for decades. The community has a majority Black and Latino population, including the Unkechaug Indian Nation, whose ancestral land is situated under the landfill.
“We came here to demand that the Brookhaven Landfill get fully closed down in 2024 as promised,” Fitzgerald said.
She defined fully closed as an end to the Brookhaven Landfill taking construction and demolition debris, which is scheduled to happen by the end of 2024 according to the preliminary town budget, and waste that is burned into ash, which the town expects to continue until capacity is reached.
The group also protested plans to open waste transfer stations — four planned for North Bellport, Brentwood, Medford and Kings Park — to haul garbage away by rail. “Fully closed means to stop the transfer of our waste to someone else’s backyard,” Fitzgerald said.
“We are burying our family members, our teachers and friends. We are overburdening our hospitals and medical facilities as a whole,” she continued. “We have a duty to act on this with urgency that this waste crisis has developed into a health crisis.”
Fetten said Brookhaven is the last to close its landfill under the Long Island Landfill Law passed by the state Legislature in 1989. “When that happens, we will undertake the same procedures for capping and closure that have been taken by every other Long Island town, following state and federal guidelines,” she said.
More than 70% of the landfill is already capped — the practice of covering “over contaminated material such as landfill waste … [to] isolate them and keep them in place to avoid the spread of contamination,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency — and the town already established a reserve fund of more than $22 million for post closure costs, Fetten said.
“Once our waste management facility ceases to take material, Brookhaven – like every other town on Long Island – will have to transport our waste to either a waste-to-energy facility or off-island by either truck or rail,” she said.
The town maintains that it should be the responsibility of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation to come up with a regional waste management plan.
To that end, $250,000 earmarked for the state agency is expected to be transferred as a grant to Stony Brook University to begin studying to “find solutions to Long Island’s impending waste crisis.” The towns of Brookhaven and Babylon, which also has a facility that accepts ash deposits, are expected to coordinate with the researchers — starting with Larry Swanson's 2023 Long Island Environmental Summit on March 15 at Stony Brook.
The summit will cover “future of solid waste management on Long Island, funding for waste infrastructure, improvement for waste-to-energy, and large scale food waste management,” according to the announcement.
Residents, including Jennifer Greene, urged the town to look at other large communities — the town of Brookhaven is larger than most cities in the U.S. — for zero waste solutions, including Boulder County, Colorado.
“Their website says check out these guides for helpful tips on how to live a more circular lifestyle and how to be a zero waste, save money while helping the planet, Earth friendly ways to celebrate the holidays, eco-cycles repair guide, and more,” Greene said. “If Brookehaven’s website has similar content, I couldn't find it.”
These practices were also recognized by a 2015 U.S. Conference of Mayors resolution, recognizing ways to minimize environmental impacts and shifting the fiscal burden of waste from local governments to producers of recycled paper and plastic.
“Zero waste is not a term to run from. It is a goal and mission to strive for that meets the demand of environmental justice,” Fitzgerald said.
“Closed means closed,” she added.
