By Hank Russell
The Suffolk Credit Union Arena on the Suffolk County Community College’s Grant Campus in Brentwood was the site of Larry Swanson’s Third Long Island Environmental Symposium, which took place on June 25. The event featured experts in the solid and organic waste industries who discussed how Long Island needs to get rid of the waste, the challenges in doing so and whether zero waste can be achieved.
Mike White, a consultant at Winters Bros./Waste Management and the interim director of the Waste Reduction and Management Institute at Stony Brook University, discussed how the transportation of waste on Long Island is relegated to trucks. He said rail is the most environmentally and economically viable alternative, but the state wants to get involved, to the detriment of the industry.
“New York State wants to regulate rail,” White said. “We don’t need another layer of regulation. We need another way to make this work.”
Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine called rail “easier said than done,” adding that only 1% of products on Long Island are transported by rail, compared to 20% nationwide. “Towns don’t have freedom of choice. They can make suggestions [on transporting recyclables], but at the ned of the day, it’s the state who’s in control.”
But, with the eventual closure of the Brookhaven landfill, something else will be needed in the future. “We’re going to need more landfills,” replied Michael Cahill, Esq., the chair of the Evan Libit Memorial Scholarship Committee, adding, “time is running out” for solving the solid waste crisis.
There was discussion of the possibility of zero waste. White called it “an aspirational goal, but that has to be a target.” But Cahill disagreed.
“Are we going to have zero waste?” Cahill asked. “No. Get used to it. … Let’s not lose sight of reality. We’re not going to change the culture.”
Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine, the event’s guest speaker, asked rhetorically, “Could we get to zero waste? Nah, but we can get closer [to it].”
One topic that was broached was glass recycling, or the lack thereof. Christine Fetten, the Town of Brookhaven’s commissioner of recycling and sustainable materials management, noted the challenges. “The purchase of commercial land [for municipal recycling facilities] is very expensive,” she said. “Often, the glass is contaminated and requires preprocessing .. [which] is very expensive.”
Fetten said glass can be used in the making of cement. Up to 35-45% of crushed glass can be part of the materials that make up cement. Romaine said there are 15 dropff points for glass recycling in Suffolk, but people will recycle their unwanted glass “only if they’re highly motivated” to do so.
Food recycling was another topic. Charlie Vigliotti, the president and CEO of Long Island Composting and American Organic Energy, explained that his company wil use an anaerobic process in which the facility will accept 180,000 tons per year of food waste which would have otherwise been transported and dumped into distant landfills, along with 30,000 tons of fats, oils and greases (“FOG”) and 10,000 tons of grass clippings. These waste streams will be converted to clean energy, clean water and compost.
Vigliotti calls this process state-of-the-art, as opposed to the current recycling processes, which he called “archaic.”
Romaine told those in attendance that he “wants to be a partner” in recycling with other companies and municipalities.
“The future is now,” Romaine said. “We either fight for the future, or we lose the future.”