WM Proposes Solid Waste Station In LIC

Waste Management (WM), a compacted waste disposal service, is seeking a permit from the city to build a solid waste transfer station in Long Island City on Review Avenue, near Newtown Creek.

The proposal for the Review Avenue facility would effect a switch from truck to rail for solid waste that is to be transported from Queens to landfill in Virginia. The plan is that within a couple of years, instead of having waste hauled out of Queens by trucks, WM could send it by rail, six trains per week. Each train car could carry enough solid waste that would take more than 50 trucks to carry thereby increasing efficiency and helping reduce the volume of truck traffic in the city. The Long Island facility would take in solid waste from the districts covered by Community Boards 1 through 6, an area covering Astoria to Forest Hills and Kew Gardens to Maspeth, Glendale and Ridgewood.

A presentation of the plan was made in mid- June at Sunnyside Community Services, with illustrated posters, a description by Waste Management officials and questions from the audience. Some of the questioners found the plan faulty and came to the meeting to make it plain they opposed granting a permit for the Review Avenue facility. Their chief objection was that while the transfer station is planned for Long Island City, the origin of rail service would be in Maspeth, not on the tracks situated between Review Avenue and Newtown Creek. The solid waste processed on Review Avenue would be loaded onto trucks, which would then be transported to the Fresh Pond rail yard in Maspeth, about a mile and a half away, and then put onto train cars.

Speaking against that plan, Maspeth activist and resident Tony Nunziata said it would do nothing to alleviate the community's problem with the heavy volume of trucking passing through each day; it would indeed make it worse.

Bob Holden, of the Juniper Valley Civic Association and Community Board 5, said that since the Review Avenue facility is not yet buit, WM is trying to obtain a permit and begin construction with an eye to inaugurating operations in early 2011.

Since there is time to revise the plan, the railroad tracks in Long Island City could be used as the point of origin and solid waste should be loaded directly from the transfer station to rail cars thus eliminating the need for trucks.

Holden, however, would use the Long Island City tracks as a means to convey a loaded train from the transfer station to a barge on Newtown Creek and float it to a rail facility in New Jersey. Currently solid waste is being transported by rail from Brooklyn and The Bronx. Trains originating there must go up the track on the eastern shore of the Hudson River to Selkirk, south of Albany, before they can cross the river and begin the trek down the western shore and into New Jersey and points south, until they reach their destination in Waverly, Virginia. If the train route to Virginia were to originate in either Maspeth or Long Island City, it would also go by way of Selkirk.

Holden believes that going north before going south is wasteful and could be bypassed with the use of a railroad barge. He also suggested the railhead and barge launch at 65th Street in Brooklyn would serve as a means of conveying trains to New Jersey.

Nunziata said that the waste transfer plan would entail loading some 65 trucks daily in Long Island City and driving all of them over to the rail point in Maspeth. Those 65 trucks being driven into Maspeth every day and then back out would increase noise, damage roadways and leave enough pollution in their wake to raise the local asthma rate.

He commented, "Maspeth is not happy" to have this happen. In addition, he said, WM must face the problem of pollution in Long Island City. The land selected for the waste transfer station is a pollution brownfield that first must be cleaned up and then pass inspection conducted by the state Department of Environmental Conservation, and that, he asserted, could take years.