‘Trash juice’: The gift that keeps on giving

The toll on our environment can last for generations.

We measure our relationship with trash in days: trash day, pickup day, the day the can is finally emptied. But that is not the end of the story. It’s just the beginning of a much longer chapter, one measured in decades rather than days. One Pinelands town is grappling with how to manage that legacy, a burden that will outlast most of the people currently living with it.

There is one landfill still operating in the Pinelands region, in Woodbine, and it accepts all the county’s trash. It’s a hard job to manage what we throw away, and Woodbine does it within the rules set by the Pinelands Comprehensive Management Plan. But the arrangement is a reminder that waste doesn’t vanish. It transforms, and it keeps transforming for a very long time after we’ve forgotten about it.

Trash buried in a landfill decomposes, albeit very slowly. That decomposition produces leachate — what I like to call “trash juice.” Woodbine generates roughly 49,000 gallons of it every day. It has to be collected and treated like any other wastewater, except it’s a far more potent cocktail. Compared with domestic sewage, landfill leachate typically carries about five times the biological oxygen demand and 20 to 25 times the ammonia. Because it can’t be treated on-site, it’s trucked to a wastewater treatment facility nearly an hour away, amounting to roughly 68,000 miles of diesel-fueled driving a year. That’s about eight extra trucks per day added to daily shore traffic.

Here’s the number that should give all of us pause: Woodbine has an estimated 130 years of remaining landfill capacity, and after the landfill itself stops accepting trash, it will keep producing leachate that needs to be managed for another 30 years. That means something we throw away this year could still be generating a truck’s worth of contaminated wastewater well into the 2150s.

Decisions being made about leachate infrastructure today — like a proposed pipeline to replace the trucking — will shape this landscape for a century and a half.

Every bag of trash we send to the curb becomes, in a very real sense, an inheritance, passed down to people who haven’t been born yet. Just as we’re now managing the tail end of waste produced by generations before us, the next generation will be left managing ours.

And it isn’t free. Trucking leachate costs money and burns diesel. The Cape May County Municipal Utilities Authority has been weighing the pros and cons of the status quo trucking arrangement against the possibility of building a pipeline instead. Moving the trash juice underground would eliminate the need for daily trucking.

The authority is currently negotiating a memorandum of agreement with the Pinelands Commission to find the most environmentally responsible way to manage this challenge. Regardless of which path it chooses, every mile driven, every gallon treated, and every foot of pipeline laid is a cost that traces back, ultimately, to what we decided to throw away.

So here’s the hopeful part that’s actually within our control. Before anything even reaches the trash can, choosing reusable items over single-use products where we can means there is simply less trash to begin with. And for the waste we still do generate, much of it can be turned into an asset for your home rather than a long-term liability for society.

Roughly one-third of what goes into a landfill is organic material: food scraps, yard waste, and other stuff that doesn’t need to sit in an airtight cell producing leachate for a century. But only about 5% of this organic material actually gets composted. It’s encouraging to see more home-compostable products like plates and cups showing up on shelves at big-box stores like Costco. However, buying compostable products is only half of the equation: If they still end up in a landfill or incinerator anyway, then we’ve skipped the part that actually matters.

When we compost that material instead of trashing it, it breaks down aerobically, above ground, in a matter of weeks or months, and becomes nutrient-rich soil. Every pound of food waste that goes into a compost bin instead of a garbage bag is a pound that never needs trucking to a landfill and never needs trucking away again as “trash juice” decades later.

That’s two truck trips eliminated for every scrap of food we keep out of the waste stream: one in, one out. Multiply that across a county, a region, a lifetime.

Composting won’t replace the need for responsible landfill management and treatment infrastructure. But it’s a lever every single one of us can actually pull, starting with tonight’s dinner scraps.