The Basics Of Landfills

About HDPE Liners

All Landfills Leak

The Catch 22's Of Landfill Design

Analyzing Why Landfills Leak

Flawed Design

EPA Admits Design Flaw	Decisions Based On Cash	It's time you were made aware!
The US EPA has admitted that the design of all modern landfills will only delay the eventual destruction of the liner and thus allow a catastrophic release of hazardous waste into ground water. The waste industry has advocated that a system of perpetual monitoring will be necessary for all landfills for thousands of years. Yet it is not made clear to the public who is expected to undertake such expenditures, we are! We would like to thank and congratulate Cumberland's Board of Supervisors for getting us into this one!	The $150 million promised this county will not even begin to pay for the restitution and cleanup that Allied Waste will leave us strapped with in the end. This is what they have done in every community they are in! Board members were quoted recently saying that the choices Cumberland County had when attempting to attract industry were limited to penitentiary's, nuclear power plants, or the garbage industry. So far as we know, only the garbage industry came bearing vast amounts of cash. In reaching their decision to allow this landfill to be built, it's made obvious that the people in charge of Cumberland County are prepared to take risks with your future in order to secure badly needed funds..	Our elected officials are called upon to render decisions that will benefit the county as a whole, not decisions that will benefit certain projects that represent potential cash income. Allied Waste has given the Board ample reason to ramrod this project down the counties throats, most of them dollar signs. $$$ Members of RAP wanted you to know that this landfill is not a "done deal" yet! History is replete with the stories of groups of greedy individuals with a total indifference to life destroying whole civilizations. If we're not careful, we'll be next. These things have happened elsewhere...in Amelia, King And Queen, and Sussex counties. Theirs is a lesson to be remembered.

Across the nation countless communities are embattled in lawsuits, and class actions against Allied Waste, and other waste handlers. Posting profits in the billions each year, these companies scoff at fines ranging in the millions, and continue to candy coat and sell their deadly poison to poor and unsuspecting communities across the nation strapped for cash like ours! They lure our officials with promises of quick cash and dividends reaching 30 or 40 years into the future.

Yet they fail to establish that the waste buried in the landfill will be toxic for thousands of years. Even landfill professionals are now saying that we should assess the true costs of landfills based on looking after each of them for 500 years! The $150+ million promised our county pales when these facts are taken seriously. Did you know that if a landfill operator sells out and files bankruptcy that in many cases they cannot be held liable for their pollution? This leaves the local residents left "holding the bag" and ultimately responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in Superfund restitution claims.

As early as 1978 the EPA knew that all landfills leak, create noxious and carcinogenic gases that pollute the environment, and destroy water tables. So why then are we still letting these people talk to us about building one of these things in our back yard? The main culprit is water. Once water gets into a landfill it mixes with the garbage, producing a toxic leachate ("garbage juice"). We know this toxic poison gets into our ground water because we have already dispelled the myth of the cap and liner system, therefore one can only say when, not if this will happen.

The members of our Board of Supervisors should have found it incumbent upon themselves to be informed of these facts, even the chairman himself admitted that they had viewed the landfill issue at length. Yet at the hearings these facts were publicly made evident by members of RAP and apparently went ignored. Are they suggesting that they know about the leaking liner and the obvious ramifications brought on by the proof of the flawed design and think it's alright to build it anyway? It is this reason that we allege that the Board of Supervisors deliberately withheld this information from the public, otherwise there would certainly be more of a broader spectrum of viewpoints on the subject. Instead what we have is a claim that 80% of Cumberland residents actually support this landfill. Which we feel is a totally bogus claim because the sheer numbers at our rallies, meetings, and events suggest otherwise.

The results of these findings is made clear, what we must do is to force Allied Waste to halt it's plans of turning our homes into a toxic dump! Until it can demonstrate technology that guarantees that a containment vessel expected to contain material that will be toxic for thousands of years, will at least out last the toxic material it is expected to contain.