JOHNSTON

The top of the mountain of trash at the state Central Landfill is 564 feet above sea level and boasts a beautiful, unobstructed view of the surrounding woods to the north and the Providence skyline off in the distance.

Bald eagles and other wildlife nest nearby, and even the landfill’s signature nuisance — seagulls —seem a natural part of the landscape.

Strolling along the top of the heap, landfill manager Brian Card says squash, cucumbers and other vegetables routinely spring up from the soil material used to cover millions of tons of trash, and workers take the harvest home.

But there is no mistaking that you are on a mountain of refuse.

Dozens of black, 4-foot-high pipes penetrate the hillside at regular intervals, collecting the methane and carbon dioxide produced by organic matter decomposing within.

Extra

Audio slideshow: The landfill is almost full

Interactive graphic: How the landfill operates

Graphic: Just how big is the landfill?

Map: The landfill could expand east

Your turn: How vigilant are you about recycling?

Your turn: What do you want to know about how to recycle in Rhode Island?

Link: Find out about what you can trash, recycle or otherwise dispose of, from the R.I. Recycling Center

More on going green in the Ocean State

A plague of plastic grocery bags dances by, some bags ending up in nets set up to prevent their escape into nearby waterways and woods.

Eventually Card looks down at the day’s active dump site where one tractor-trailer-length truck after another grunts up the hill to dump anywhere from 3,500 to 5,000 tons of trash daily just as they have for the last 15 years.

“The thing about trash that I have learned is that it’s easy to put on the curb — then it disappears,” Card says, as he examines the daily waste dumped at Phase 5, the swath of landfill that covers 32 acres of the landfill’s 254-acre footprint.

Every year 1.2 million tons are added to the gigantic trash heap. At the current rate, the landfill will reach capacity in two years and the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation, the agency that runs the operation, is seeking a $70-million expansion that would consume 100 more acres and extend the life of the landfill until 2020.

The expansion could be delayed while the state investigates allegations of mismanagement by the board of directors that runs the corporation. In November, Resource Recovery’s executive director, Michael O’Connell, alerted Governor Carcieri to a questionable land deal and charitable donations made by the board.

Last month, Carcieri nominated six new members to the board, which was down to only one voting member after two members quit and the governor did not renominate the four others.

The board must deal with the landfill’s impending expansion, contracts that need renewal and low recycling rates; it should be prepared to get to work as soon as the state Senate confirms the new members, O’Connell said. Officials expect the confirmations in the next couple of months.

“The new board members better be ready to get busy,” he said. “It’s not going to be coffee and doughnuts.”

PART OF THE plan to prolong the life of the landfill is to focus on recycling.

The State House has taken notice, hosting the first Senate meeting on recycling in January and organizing a tour of the landfill in February. The General Assembly is considering a bottle bill for the first time in about seven years and legislation to boost commercial and municipal recycling, ban the dumping of electronic-waste and limit the use of plastic bags.

People and businesses have resisted recycling in the past — with only about 15 percent of municipal waste and 4 percent of commercial trash being recycled.

Nationally, Americans recycled about 32.5 percent of their waste in 2006, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“I think the people that want to recycle already are,” O’Connell said. “There are a good portion of the people out there who don’t care. The way to get them to care is to have the cost come back to them directly, as in pay-as-you-throw [for each bag of garbage].”

A law requiring the commercial sector to recycle 17 waste streams — such as plastics, metals, paper — is not enforced, and voluntary recycling often costs more.

In January, the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management sent letters to more than 2,300 businesses asking them to provide the agency with information to help boost the low recycling rates in the commercial sector.

The questionnaire asked businesses about the common things they throw away and whether they recycle and how. For now, the DEM is asking businesses how it can help them improve their recycling habits and will wait until next year to fine those that don’t comply.

Existing recycling laws have been hard to enforce because the department can’t assign enough people to the task, said Terrence Gray, assistant director of air, waste and compliance for the DEM.

THE TROUBLES with statewide recycling are obvious as trucks enter the landfill, dumping yards of debris — cardboard, plastics, drinking containers — that could be recycled. And once trash is at the landfill, the manpower to separate out recyclable goods — while impressive — is only moderately successful.

When trash haulers enter the facility, they head to several areas depending on their load.

Municipal garbage, minus recyclables, is taken directly to the daily dump, while blue and green bin goods head to the Materials Recycling Facility, also known as the “murf,” for sorting. Dirty commercial loads, such as restaurant waste, can’t be sorted, but many other loads contain significant amounts of accessible recyclable materials.

Those are dumped on the concrete floor of the tip facility, a deafening, stadium-sized, semi-enclosed structure where about a dozen workers in soiled orange jumpsuits and small cranes root through truck after truck of business waste. It’s dangerous work, as huge trucks enter and exit the facility to dump loads of trash, which are pushed around by huge bulldozers.

The purpose: to pull out recyclable goods and save them from taking up space in the landfill.

Old water heaters, computer monitors, copper wire and heaps of cardboard are pulled out. Cardboard itself gets a good price on the world market at $130 a ton.

Still, the tip facility, says Sarah Kite, recycling manager for Resource Recovery, manages to recover only about 1 percent of recyclable goods from the commercial waste stream, which includes rubbish from schools, government offices and apartment buildings and accounts for 60 percent of the annual trash produced in the state.

The tip facility, which opened in 2002, would be razed as part of the expansion. Resource Recovery is considering whether it is cost-effective to rebuild it, Kite said.

About a quarter mile south of the tip facility, about 30 workers, goggles and masks covering their mouths, take up position along several conveyer belts in the Materials Recycling Facility.

Under the faint warmth of heat lamps, the workers do a frantic, monotonous task separating the nonrecyclables — clear plastic takeout trays, yogurt containers, motor oil jugs — from the recyclable as the objects move on the swift-moving conveyer belts.

In an area separate from the bottles and cans room, another set of workers sorts through mounds of paper products, pulling out the occasional piece of cardboard that ends up in the load. A thick cloud of dust that never settles hangs over the room.

On days when the flow of recyclables is low, the temporary workers are sent home early.

LITTLE HAS changed over the last 15 years — which is good and bad for the landfill.

In 1993, Journal reporter Bob Wyss wrote a seven-part series examining the state’s waste predicament. Most of the problems remain today.

The amount of garbage that Rhode Islanders produced — 1.2 million tons a year — has remained steady for more than a decade, while the population has grown by about 50,000 people. Divided among the population, the state’s annual waste output translates to about six pounds a person per day.

But recycling habits and poor enforcement of commercial recycling law have not improved.

Now, 15 years later, the landfill has 18 million more tons of garbage.

“I think until you have a crisis, it’s not on the radar screen [of Rhode Islanders],” said Kite. “But that day is approaching.”

To fend off the crisis, the landfill needs to be expanded. If approved, construction would start this summer. The $70-million expansion would increase the landfill’s footprint almost 30 percent and would include razing and rebuilding of the agency’s offices, among other buildings. The recycling facility would remain.

Expansion of the Central Landfill is only a stopgap measure, and will probably buy the state only another decade at the Johnston site — unless recycling can be boosted or alternative methods, such as waste-to-energy plants, are undertaken.

One thing is certain, nobody wants a landfill or incinerator in his backyard, and residents across the state have vehemently opposed such proposals. Plans to build three incinerators in the 1980s set off years of protests and lawsuits that resulted in legislation to ban incineration outright.

Other New England states have already confronted their waste problems, choosing a combination of increased dumping fees, exportation of their garbage out of state and incineration. In Rhode Island, municipal and commercial tipping fees stand at $32 and $56 a ton respectively for haulers with contracts with the Central Landfill, and they are below competitive rates in the Northeast. The General Assembly controls the municipal rate, and Resource Recovery sets the commercial fee.

In 2004, the regional average was $70.53 per municipal ton, according to data compiled by the National Solid Waste Management Association.

Had state lawmakers allowed the rate to grow gradually, as mandated by previous legislation, municipal tipping fees would be more than $50 a ton and cost cities and towns about $6.5 million more a year, said state Sen. V. Susan Sosnowski, D-South Kingstown, who is chairwoman of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Agriculture.

The state’s garbage problem is one of Sosnowski’s top priorities this legislative session, but she does not favor an increase in municipal fees.

Instead, Sosnowski introduced a bill requiring cities and towns that contract with Resource Recovery to recycle at least 35 percent of their waste. No communities in the state have reached that rate.

The bill, S-2797, also requires businesses with more than 50 employees to include recycling collection in their contracts with haulers.

For the long term, O’Connell said the corporation is exploring alternatives to the landfill, especially waste-to-energy facilities. Most new technologies involve some form of heating trash that results in a significant reduction in volume, energy production and some form of residual waste ash, which must be stored. Emissions data is still largely unknown because few plants exist.

He said Resource Recovery is considering a facility that would be owned and operated by a private company and would accept the state’s garbage as fuel at no additional cost to the state.

To prevent such a facility from being built in Rhode Island, some senators have introduced another bill, S-2796, to expand the state’s existing definition of incineration to include thermal degradation and processes that turn garbage into a gas and residue.

O’Connell said the corporation opposes this bill and wants regulators to determine the environmental viability of the plants.

Clean Water Action and local groups such as the Rhode Island chapter of the Sierra Club and Environmental Rhode Island favor reduced consumption, recycling and reuse of many commonly thrown-away items over incineration, exportation and expansion.

“We still think that trash energy is not a viable option right now,” said Sheila Dormody, the executive director of the Rhode Island affiliate of Clean Water Action.

ONE DAY this winter, a black three-seat couch, some clothing, old toys, tires, plastic bags full of Styrofoam and a basketball are visible among the detritus dropped atop the muddy patch of the daily dump site in Phase 5.

Vibrations of bulldozers and garbage trucks travel through the spongy ground amid the nonstop advance and retreat of the hulking vehicles as they dump, spread and compact the daily deposit to the ever-expanding base of the mountain of trash.

When not scattered by firecrackers, seagulls flock overhead. They circle waiting to snatch a meal from the avalanche of plastic kitchen garbage bags, which although biodegradable, can take decades to decompose buried in the landfill without air, water and sunlight — the three elements that accelerate the decay of refuse.

Newspapers from 10 years ago are still readable when dug up, says Card, the landfill’s manager. Like his colleague Kite, Card stresses the need to save as much as possible from the rubbish can, even if its origins are natural.

Against one of the fences that corral windblown plastic bags is propped a 5-foot-tall white plastic clown head wearing a sadly comical frown as he surveys the scene below.

“We’re consumers,” Card says, surrounded by several thousand tons of new garbage waiting to be buried in the mountain — part of a single day’s waste.

ngarcia@projo.com