N.J. to stop notorious Meadowlands landfill from polluting Passaic River after years of delay

A 94-acre landfill in the Meadowlands will be walled off to prevent oil, insecticides, sewage sludge and a slew of other toxic waste from leaching into the Passaic River under a $39.4 million project announced Monday by state officials. 

Workers will begin preparations this week to build a containment wall around the 1D landfill in Kearny. It will hold the tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater that leaches into the surrounding waterways every day. 

When the project is completed in two years, as much as 83,000 gallons of landfill wastewater, called leachate, will be collected daily under a newly built system. It will be sent to the Passaic Valley Sewerage Authority’s plant for treatment. Landfill gases like methane that now discharge to the air will be captured and burned to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

“It will begin with the clearing of trees and shrubs and proceed with construction of a containment wall that will be up to 50 feet deep," said Mark Pedersen, assistant commissioner for site remediation and waste management at the state Department of Environmental Protection. 

The project, one of the largest landfill closures the DEP has ever done, has been a long time coming.

The landfill opened in the 1970s on a plot of land sandwiched between the New Jersey Turnpike and Route 280, with NJ Transit and Amtrak lines bordering its south side. 

The landfill took in a host of industrial material, including 1.5 million gallons of waste oil, pharmaceuticals, sewage sludge, asphalt sludge and insecticides. The DEP would later discover volatile chemicals and heavy metals in the surrounding soil, groundwater, surface water and river sediment.

The state ordered its owner, the Municipal Sanitary Landfill Authority, to stop operating in 1982 when the landfill reached its maximum height. But the landfill wasn't properly sealed, and by the mid-1990s it was leaching an estimated 250,000 gallons a day under the railroad tracks and into the Passaic.

In 1999, the DEP began to investigate the extent of the contamination, but efforts to seal the landfill were stalled. A plan by the state Meadowlands Commission to close 1D using money generated from tipping fees at the nearby Keegan Landfill never materialized. 

The $39.4 million will be funded by the state, not polluters.

"It's unfortunate, because we weren't able to find any responsible parties," said Larry Hajna, a DEP spokesman. "We prefer not to do this, but we have to spend the taxpayers' money on this one."

Bill Sheehan, director of the Hackensack Riverkeeper, said the state should have used $300 million from settlements it has made in recent years with polluters of the Passaic River — money that was instead diverted by Gov. Chris Christie to plug holes in the state budget. 

"Of course, I’m happy they’re moving forward, but this shouldn't be the taxpayers' money," Sheehan said. "This should have come from the settlements. If they were using that money, it wouldn’t be that bitter a pill to swallow."

Wildflowers, grasses and other plants will be planted on the landfill to provide habitat for songbirds and other wildlife when the project is completed, state officials said.