Trash Trucks are Here:
NYC garbage enters countyNew York City sanitation trucks began traveling through the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels and over the George Washington and Goethals Bridges Monday.
About 400 of the white compactor trucks will carry an average of 3,200 tons per day of New York residential garbage to the Essex County Incinerator in Newark and Union County landfills over the next three years.
The New York Department of Sanitation calls this its interim plan to deal with the closing of the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island.
New York must now export more and more of its garbage as it reduces dumping at Fresh Kills from 26,000 tons a day to zero by the end of 2001. The landfill is scheduled to close by court order, on Dec. 31, 2001.
According to a report issued by New York Sanitation Commissioner Kevin P. Farrell on Thursday, the trucks will add less than two-tenths of one percent to the total truck volume now carried by those Hudson River crossings.
Under the announced plan, the trucks will make the majority of the crossings between 7 p.m. and 5 a.m. About six trucks per hour will travel through the Holland Tunnel, with about 10 per hour traveling through the Lincoln Tunnel.
New York has been able to win the needed state permits to allow the trucks' crossing based on the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution.
But Jersey City Councilman Robert Cavanaugh, an opponent of long term plans to build a marine-to-rail transfer station in Jersey City to move about 6,000 tons a day of the New York garbage, said he is frustrated by New York City's decision to send its garbage west.
"New York is a big state; they have plenty of landfills," said Cavanaugh. "The reason New York City is in this dilemma is because New York's own people don't want to take their own garbage."
"Why should they be able to say, 'If you don't let us build a transfer station in the heart of your metropolitan area - we'll just have to drive our trucks through your streets?'"