Talkin Trash: Albany Landfill Running Out of Space

This story appeared in the Albany, NY Sunday Times Union paper on 1/30/11


Special series: Garbage is piling up, what will Albany and neighboring communities do when the Rapp Road landfill reaches capacity?

Those who don't believe that history repeats itself need look no further than the Capital Region's long and tumultuous relationship with its garbage.

Four decades ago, room at the North Albany dump was swiftly running out. New York's capital city was facing a hard deadline with state mandates to find someplace else to send its trash.

But in 1969, the year man first walked on the moon, some of the region's garbage was still being fed to pigs and a story in the Times Union speculated that in the not-to-distant future, 1984, trash might simply be sucked from homes via high-speed vacuum tubes to a central collection point.

There were calls for regional cooperation and a hopeful eye on modern technology that would revolutionize our relationship with the trash we produce.

Today in 2011, Albany's Rapp Road landfill -- billed in the late 1960s as the modern, better-regulated cousin to the city dump, despite being built in and around the environmentally sensitive Pine Bush -- is running out of space.

Stories from the series continue Feb. 3 through 6.



Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Exclusively-in-the-Sunday-Times-Union-print-824357.php#ixzz1CZNH3HEi