Nation’s Landfill Problems Grow as U.S. Tightens Regulations : Waste: In the last 10 years, America lost more than 70% of its dumps. Half of the remaining 6,000 will be shut by the year 2000, largely to avoid having to comply with federal standards, officials say.

Across New York Harbor from the Statue of Liberty stands a monstrous monument to the throw-away society.

It is Fresh Kills--the world’s largest landfill. Each day, more than 30,000 tons of garbage is added to this corner of Staten Island.

The trash at Fresh Kills towers 150 feet above New York Harbor. It generates 5 million cubic feet of methane a year, enough to heat 50,000 homes, and by the end of the decade, it is expected to be 500 feet high--the highest prominence on the East Coast south of Maine and half as tall as the Chrysler Building or the Statue of Liberty. City authorities say it cannot be piled higher without blocking flight paths to and from Newark International Airport.

“Fresh Kills is big and ugly, but it’s not one of a kind,” says Bruce Weddle, director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s municipal solid-waste program. “Few major city landfills these days meet environmental standards. New York is lucky to have this.”

In fact, Fresh Kills is the sole repository of New York’s trash. It is allowed to operate in violation of scores of sanitation laws because all other facilities in the region have been closed. Officials say they have no choice.

In nearby New Jersey, which already ships 66% of its trash to other states, guards are posted at supermarkets to protect trash bins from free-lance dumping. In other Northeastern states, agencies such as Goodwill and the Salvation Army have been forced to close their outdoor receptacles and bins. Instead of repairable goods, the charities have been swamped with junk such as dead animals, oil cans and food scraps.

“We want broken goods, not garbage,” said James White, a Boston-area Goodwill employee. “What’s happened to people’s sense of shame?”

Shame appears to be a commodity that can be reduced by distance. Many East Coast cities, unwilling to impose taxes to finance local solutions, pay to send trucks, 24 hours a day, as far west as Ohio and Indiana. Nodody wants trash dumped in their back yard, but America and the world are running out of yard space. Consider the odyssey of the Mobro, the garbage scow that spent two months at sea several years back, searching for a home for 3,100 tons of rotting trash. The cargo eventually was returned to sender, the Long Island community of Islip.

(Because of Long Island’s high water table--just 3 to 4 feet from the surface--most municipal dumping is banned. Towns send their refuse as far away as Canada, and wildcatters fill the countryside with illegal dumping.)

“We realize there’s no equitable solution, not even a half-way decent one,” said Judith Yaskin, New Jersey’s environmental protection commissioner. “We’re trying to work with the least offensive monster we can find.”

The fact is, such a monster is hard to come by.

In the last 10 years, America lost more than 70% of its landfills; about 14,000 dumps were closed. Of the remaining 6,000 sites, half will be shut by the year 2000, largely to avoid having to comply with new federal standards, officials say.

Few new landfills are being opened to replace the old ones. Wide-open Texas issued only 35 permits in 1989, even as authorities closed hundreds of landfills. California, which has some of the strictest regulations, has licensed only a handful of sites in the last year.

Even in Alaska, landfill space is at a premium, sharply limited by mountainous terrain, climate and the tendency of garbage to attract bears. Of 220 villages, 165 have inadequate sanitation and do not meet federal standards, according to officials. In some villages where lack of money has precluded water and sewer systems, landfills serve as community septic tanks where household chamber pots are emptied.

Americans have become the world’s trash junkies. They generate at least twice as much waste per capita as the Japanese or Europeans. Each New York resident discards nine times his body weight each year, three times the rate of industrial Milan or Dusseldorf. And that has been true since earliest times. The 19th-Century French observer Alexis de Tocqueville was appalled at the number of dead horses and coal scrap heaps outside the American cities he visited.

America’s throwaway habits go to its roots. When historians excavate Colonial sites, they look first for the remnants of household trash. That unerringly means there was a window or a door nearby. Americans, it seems, never cared where their trash went, as long as it went.

Perhaps that explains why 80% of America’s 200 million tons of trash continues to flow into the remaining landfills, two-thirds of which do not meet state or federal environmental regulations. Fresh Kills, for instance, breaks every rule in the book. Wildlife is poisoned by its unfiltered fumes and slicks each day, and barrels of toxins are leaching into the ground water.

Trash industry leaders can only shrug. For a variety of reasons, they say, there are no successors to today’s pollution juggernauts.

“The raw fact is that in today’s regulatory environment, it’s far easier to keep a lousy dump in operation than to open a clean one and meet all the (specifications),” said Anthony Lomangino, president of Brooklyn Star Recycling. “You learn to make do with what you have.”

And, although environmentalists complain about overcrowded, under-tended landfills, they also are partly blamed for current conditions. It was because of the host of special environmental interests pulling in various directions, that alternatives to landfills were never designed.

Leaf-burning, for instance, was prohibited by law and lawn trimmings were sent into landfills. Battery-recycling sites were closed and toxic waste was sent into landfills. Dozens of municipal incinerators were shut after tests found that they discharged pollutants, including dioxin and hydrogen chloride.

Moreover, recycling programs endorsed by environmental lobbyists often provided few incentives and were difficult to work out: Many Americans clearly disliked the inconvenience of separating trash, washing out cans and bundling newspapers. Further, many programs threw the supply-and-demand equation hopelessly out of whack.

“There is always a Catch-22 element to the business,” said Paul Cassidy, an EPA environmental engineer. “The more materials recycled, the less valuable they become. Consequently, the market for recycled goods is always being reduced. There are only so many uses for old pop bottles and newspapers.”

Fixing landfills so they can receive more and more trash has proved equally unworkable. New EPA regulations, outlined in the agency’s draft agenda for action on solid waste, require pits to have costly synthetic or clay liners and sophisticated underground drainage systems. Compliance with the rules is too expensive for many cities, so some opt to ship their garbage to somebody else’s back yard--at a rate of $90 to $200 per ton.

“The statutes were meant to improve things, but operators are getting frustrated and they’re bailing out,” said Robin Woods, an EPA spokesman. “Many of today’s closed landfills are going to become wards of tomorrow’s Superfund (federal billion-dollar toxic-cleanup program).”

No solution seems ideal. Just ask residents of the Long Island community of Hempstead, N. Y. They once had a coal-burning, trash-burning incinerator. It spewed soot, heavy metals and dioxin and the odor of rotten eggs. Protests forced its closure in the early 1980s.

The community’s two landfills quickly reached capacity. One was closed in 1984, the second in 1988. Each week since then, the community has paid nearly $160 a ton to ship its trash west. Recycling efforts scarcely dented that load.

“They eventually had to go back to the old solution, the incinerator nobody wanted,” said Lomangino, “but this time, they wanted to do it right.”

The first step was to repair badly damaged community relations and explain why nasty incinerators were suddenly just fine. City officials sent newsletters to each of the town’s 250,000 households, and plant officials met with homeowners. A 24-hour telephone line was established to field complaints, which resulted in modifications of the plant’s design.

“All that hassle meant our incinerator probably became the safest--and most expensive--waste-to-energy plant in the world,” one city official said.

The $360-million incinerator has a “scrubber,” which injects lime into flue gas to neutralize acid rain components, special grates to boost combustion and a “bag house” containing more than a thousand vacuum cleaner-like bags that capture toxic ash.

Although taxes had to be raised to pay for incinerator construction, the city’s routine disposal costs have been cut in half--to $80 a ton--and the landfill burden has been greatly reduced. A side benefit: The plant produces electricity for 60,000 households and will earn, when fully operational, $6 million a year.

Incinerators, which consume about 5% of the nation’s wastes, will be burning four times that much trash within five years, the EPA estimates. Although 52 major waste-to-energy plants are under construction, to join 166 already operating, experts warn that not all landfill problems can be burned away.

That was painfully discovered by the tiny Michigan community township of Dafter, population 900. They dug up their old dump, hoping to cart it away or burn it. They were unable to do either. What they found defied easy disposal.

In the tiny landfill were 18 dead bison, tons of oil sludge from a Wisconsin piston-ring factory and unmarked bags of medical wastes from a nearby hospital.

Nobody remembered putting any of that there, and nobody wanted to touch it after it had been rediscovered.

The landfill was quietly refilled.