The Garbage State

Marisa Scott’s vile guest arrived just in time for Christmas dinner.

Bowls of Sunday sauce beckoned from her dining room table. Red and green plates flaunted fresh mozzarella balls, juicy olives and savory eggplant rollatini. The aroma of sizzling meatballs seeped from her oven.

Scott’s first Christmas in her two-story Tinton Falls home felt like a scene from an Italian American dream.

Until the intruder broke in without warning.

The silent assassin overwhelmed the 15 guests, the mouth-watering food and the four-bedroom home.

“What the hell is that?” Scott’s mother asked that fateful day in 2018.

It was Scott’s first encounter with the stench, a life-altering assault on the senses that made her worry something was wrong with her septic tank.

Scott, now 37, soon learned the troubling source. Her family had unknowingly moved exactly 3,000 feet from one of the state’s largest landfills, a trash mountain that devours 1,390 tons of rancid waste every day.

“It was a complete crap show…” says Scott, a mother of three wearing oversized sunglasses and her black hair swept up in a bun. “It smelled like cinnamon-coated garbage.”

New Jersey’s always been full of trash. But it’s about to be stuffed with more people and more garbage than ever, setting up a high-stakes collision that threatens health and quality of life in every corner of the state.

Ten of the state’s 12 major landfills want to expand or have already begun to enlarge. Together, they are set to grow by 89 million cubic yards over the next two decades. In other words, the state will be piling more than 27,000 Olympic-size swimming pools worth of new garbage onto trash heaps that would already fill MetLife Stadium 41 times.

Meanwhile, America’s most densely populated state keeps building new developments closer to landfills with little regard for what emanates from them on windy days.

It’s a showdown between an immovable object and a repulsively putrid force — with lawsuits and official complaints building.

But there’s no easy solution, despite millions in tax dollars poured into the quest for a fix. More people equals more garbage. The trash has to go somewhere.

“There’s not really a lot of places left, if any, where you would open a new landfill,” says Jordan Howell, a Rowan University professor and author of “Garbage in the Garden State.”

“They’ve all been safely expanded … but I think most of them are not intended to be stretched as far as they have been.”

Every landfill’s stench varies by weather and season. But there’s no sugarcoating it for Scott or thousands of others who live within nose-shot.

Tinton Falls residents lodged so many complaints about the landfill odor that borough officials set up a dedicated hotline in April 2024 for them to vent. Absecon residents are so disgusted by their local landfill that they filed a lawsuit in May of last year alleging major health detriments, including reduced lung function.

Collectively, New Jersey landfills have been hit with more than 1,300 state citations in the past 20 years, according to regulators. They include leachate seeping into nearby waterways, failing to keep fetid smells within the fence line and improperly using odor and air quality control devices.

But there’s plenty of blame to go around. Municipal officials, local developers and even homebuyers share some responsibility, according to Matthew DeNafo, president and engineer for the Atlantic County Utilities Authority landfill in Egg Harbor.

“Don’t change zoning to put housing,” he says. “There’s people that may not do the research for a home. It’s 1,500 feet from the landfill. That’s poor planning.”

Like most states, New Jersey has no law requiring sellers to disclose when houses are near a landfill. And the state of 9.5 million has no waste-czar or statewide master plan for its garbage.

So families like the Scotts suffer.

You can’t escape the foul smell, explains Marie Gallashaw, 76, a Tinton Falls lifer who was around long before the nearby Monmouth County Reclamation Center landfill opened in the mid-1970s.

It’s consistently cited for odor and air quality issues by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, including not properly storing waste overnight.

“I haven’t opened my windows,” Gallashaw says, “since 1976.”

A collision course

Gallashaw rolls a forest green trash bin down her long driveway and watches the garbage trucks creep down Shafto Road.

She still remembers the way it was.

Tinton Falls was full of fresh air and open space back in the early 1970s. Then the landfill came to town. And the stench. And all the new houses, too.

In the half century it took for the Monmouth County Reclamation Center to quadruple in size from 55 acres to 266, Gallashaw’s hometown added more than 6,000 new homes. The

Gallashaw adjusts her glasses under her furrowed brow. She’s not surprised people have bought homes so close to the ever-growing landfill, the state’s second largest by permitted size. It’s not advertised in real estate listings, she says.

Landfills are not always visible within smelling distance. And some developments pass the sniff test when potential buyers tour a home only to stink worse than a soiled diaper baking in the sun after they sign on the dotted line.

“When the realtors sold them the houses,” Gallashaw says, “they didn’t tell them.”

The same story is playing out across the state, where more than 26,000 new homes have been built since 1990 in towns hosting landfills, according to an NJ Advance Media analysis of real estate data on housing tracker Point2Homes.

In Tinton Falls, 348 building permits were issued for homes in 2020 alone — surpassing the prior seven years combined. East Brunswick — home to the Middlesex County landfill — approved 448 new homes in 2014 and another 200 two years ago, according to the Department of Community Affairs.

Not all of those homes are within the landfill’s stench radius. At least not right now. But environmental experts worry that New Jersey’s insatiable demand for housing could lure unsuspecting homebuyers into stink traps from Warren County to Cape May.

For instance, anyone traveling down Huntington or Corolla in Egg Harbor can’t miss the wooden skeletons of under-construction homes lining the streets. They’re dotted with flashy white and blue signs reading: “Now Selling.”

The signs don’t mention the Atlantic County Utilities Authority landfill is just 1.9 miles down the hill. Or the lawsuit alleging quality of life has been compromised for the facility’s neighbors in Absecon.

The smell is so foul, Renee Haynes has stopped inviting guests to her Ables Run Drive home.

“I don’t know when it’s going to come … so it’s really, for me, it’s really depressing,” Haynes said of the smell. “Physically, mentally and everything is just so depressing.”

New Jersey has disclosure laws that require realtors to mention risks like flood zones, harmful lead pipes or contaminated soil or water on site. But it’s not one of the eight states that require sellers to disclose if a landfill operates within a mile, according to the Center for Public Health Law Research at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law.

Alexis Siciliano-Bell, a RE/MAX agent based in Asbury Park, tells prospective Tinton Falls buyers about the Monmouth County Reclamation Center, she says, even though she is not required to.

Some aren’t turned off when they hear about the landfill, she says. But others have walked away.

Trash disposal has been a problem in New Jersey since Victorian Era New Yorkers sent their garbage to Secaucus pig farms. Today, the state buries nearly 4 million tons of waste per year by the latest count and has more than 100 trash sites of at least 35 acres.

Landfills were a sensible step forward from the era when the Meadowlands was America’s favorite dumping ground. But the state’s permitted operating space has ballooned from 1,382 acres in 2000 to 1,884 acres today.

Can’t see the chart below? Click here.

And most of New Jersey’s major landfills are located in areas already considered disproportionately polluted.

The largest ongoing expansion — a 72-acre addition planned at the Cape May County Municipal Utilities Authority landfill — will extend its life by another 100 years.

It will allow for enough new waste to fill the Empire State Building 19 times.

Of course, this isn’t just about garbage. It’s also about cold hard cash. New Jersey landfills pay up to $10 per ton of waste to their “host community,” generating hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in annual revenue.

Call it stench money if you want, but landfills keep property taxes low. And low property taxes drew many of the homeowners to these towns.

Landfill towns often have lower property tax bills than their neighbors. In fact, two host towns — Woodbine and Manchester — have some of the lowest property taxes in the state.

“When you talk about trying to close this down and come up with an alternative, it’s really not positive financially for anybody,” Monmouth County Commissioner Director Thomas Arnone says.

Scott loves the Tinton Falls community and doesn’t want to leave. But the Monmouth County Reclamation Center is expanding by three more acres to extend its operations to 2045.

That means more years of rumbling noise. The inability to host family. Worsening asthma symptoms for Scott and her daughter when the air gets thick.

The Bayonne native admits her research could have been more thorough before she closed on her $260,000 home, a 1,720-square-foot expanded cape cod with egg shell beige siding and salmon shutters.

Scott knew there was a “reclamation center” somewhere in town. But the name was misleading, she says.

“You think of a place where maybe you bring recycled goods or you bring the household items that you don’t need anymore,” Scott says. “Not where you bring household trash for the whole county.”

The battleground

Ricky King-Luke sees no reason to mince words.

He circles his crimson couch — accented by a toucan pillow — and taps the tiny chandelier-styled air diffuser in his dining room.

It’s helped a little these past eight years, says King-Luke, clad in a black-and-white checkerboard suit and silver-and-gold Chanel pin.

But the machine is no match for the stench. The Absecon man plans his day around the smell from the landfill about 1,000 feet away.

“We sleep upstairs, it comes upstairs, ” adds a glum King-Luke, 61, sitting in his living room with his husband, David. “It’s like someone is strangling me.”

King-Luke’s realtor never mentioned the nearby landfill, he says, when the couple moved in 2017 to Bel Aire Lakes from Pennsylvania. Now they are among 100 or so residents from the development suing the Atlantic County Utilities Authority landfill in Egg Harbor.

The stakes are high — and extend far beyond odor, experts say. Living next to a landfill can put you at higher risk for lung cancer. Asthma. Respiratory infections, especially in children. And those are just some of the long-term consequences.

King-Luke loves the 125-unit community, but he is considering leaving.

“We cannot take a chance with our health,” he says.

The plaintiffs allege they’ve suffered acute and chronic health issues like reduced lung function, irritation of the eyes-nose-throat and “generalized anxiety,” according to their 2,042-page complaint in the U.S. District Court of New Jersey.

The landfill was built in the 1990s and began to process municipal trash in 2000. It predates the 55-and-older housing development, which opened in 2006, following a zoning change to allow residential construction.

But repeated exposure to hazardous air pollutants “have damaged the health of these elderly residents and have destroyed their ability to use and enjoy their property, all of which must be compensated,” says Peter Fontaine, lead attorney for the plaintiffs.

A fence and trees obstruct the small patch of dirt that separates the properties, so it’s not visible at ground level to anyone driving or walking in the community, according to Fontaine. The landfill says it does much of its stinkiest work — including burying waste — at night to be less of a nuisance. But anyone shopping for houses during the day may not run across the worst of the stench.

The smell has gotten stronger over the years, and more flocks of birds perch on rooftops compared to when the residents first arrived, the lawsuit claims.

The state Department of Environmental Protection has cited the landfill more than 400 times and fined it $535,000 over the past 20 years, according to an NJ Advance Media review. The violations include “excessive windblown litter” and “garbage and rotten egg-like odors.”

The landfill counters that odor issues have improved in recent years and nearby waterways are drawing the birds.

Temperature and storms can also wreak havoc, says DeNafo, the landfill president. Gas collection systems get clogged with rainwater. Blowers go down. Pipes crack. The stench is an opportunist, seizing on the smallest of vulnerabilities.

“There are certain things that are out of our control, especially when it comes to weather,” DeNafo explains.

The ongoing lawsuit could be a preview of what’s to come in New Jersey as landfills grow and nearby development continues, experts say.

With so much trash, New Jersey must rely on expanding the commercial landfills it has, according to Howell, the Rowan professor and author.

The other alternative? Send more garbage to other states, which could cost residents substantially more due to higher fees.

‘Necessary evil’

Matthew DeNafo offers his Toyota Rav4 as he stands atop a trash heap about 100 feet high.

After all, you never know what you might encounter in the 102-acre Atlantic County Utilities Authority landfill, he says.

Tractors lumber by with random garbage. Plastic bags. Corn chip pieces. Torn pizzeria menus.

Mustard yellow vegetation bends in a steady wind as I stare at massive nets that stop trash from blowing around. An unmistakable odor hugs every breath.

Welcome to ground zero, the genesis for one of New Jersey’s most controversial stenches.

DeNafo, a bearded figure in a highlighter yellow safety vest, raises his voice above the crunching tires.

“Humans are wasteful in nature…” he says. “It’s an unfortunate, necessary evil.”

By the latest count, New Jersey residents create over 21 million tons of waste a year, up from 16 million tons in 1995.

The Atlantic County landfill processes roughly 1,200 tons of garbage a day and takes in about 325,000 tons per year. Burying it under mounds of dirt helps hide the funk. But that initial rankness is only the beginning.

A byproduct of decomposing garbage is landfill gas, primarily a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide. It’s mostly odorless, DeNafo says. But as waste breaks down, it can also produce hydrogen sulfide. Just a little can spawn an unpleasant, eggy odor.

“That’s something that we’re constantly trying to manage,” DeNafo says.

Landfill operators in New Jersey are powerless to stop the stench once it escapes the ground, they say. So instead they try to catch it.

PVC pipes jutting out of the ground are part of the landfill’s 100-foot vertical gas wells. Gas collection — a network including more than 125 wells, pipes and a vacuum system — helps capture the stench. And odor-detection devices provide 360-degree readings of the landfill and send updates to DeNafo’s phone.

But pounding rains complicate the issue.

When rain douses decomposing garbage at a landfill, it creates dreaded “leachate,” which can ultimately seep into nearby waterways, causing more odors and more health risks.

How much a landfill can harm your health depends on how well the landfill manages its garbage, according to Timothy Townsend, a professor in the department of environmental engineering sciences at the University of Florida.

“The real problem we have is that we in the United States continue to rely on landfills so much,” he says, “largely because it’s the cheapest way to manage the waste.”

Some states like California, Colorado and Oregon are on the cutting edge, using drones and satellites to monitor large methane leaks.

Atlantic County has invested more than $16 million in its landfill gas collection and control systems in the past 20 years, according to county spokesperson Sara Verrillo. The Atlantic County Utilities Authority oversees more than 100 acres of trash, which runs more than 100 feet deep and has been there for three decades.

In the past year, the county added or re-drilled 32 gas collection wells, two dewatering sumps and nearly 25,000 feet of new pipeline to combat odor.

But often, it’s not enough.

Not far from the landfill, a new Egg Harbor resident — a transplant from Delaware — overhears me talking about the smell and says she recently sniffed a mysterious odor. She describes it as mushrooms mixed with manure.

It was so pungent, she slammed her windows shut and didn’t open them for a week.

She refused to give her name before heading inside.

She didn’t want to be associated with the stench.

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Steven Rodas may be reached at srodas@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Bluesky at @stevenrodas.bsky.social.

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