Sustainable Sullivan

Callicoon

To the editor:

In a letter dissing the current Sullivan County Legislature, its former chair, Rob Doherty, recently asserted that the county “does the absolute worst thing you can do environmentally with our garbage. We haul it 5 hours up the road to dump it in a hole which produces methane gas, which is 84 time worse for the environment than carbon.” (Letters, March 7, 2025)

Let’s parse this statement, which includes several inaccuracies. First, presumably Mr. Doherty meant “carbon dioxide” rather than carbon, the basic building block of life.

It is true that methane has 84 times more warming power than CO2 — but only for 20 years. Methane is a short-lived gas — unlike carbon dioxide, which persists in the atmosphere for centuries. And while it is true that landfills produce methane, Sullivan’s trash goes to Seneca Meadows Landfill, which captures that gas and converts it to electricity.

As for hauling our garbage “5 hours up the road,” Mr. Doherty exaggerates. According to Google Maps, Seneca Meadows is three hours and 15 minutes away from the Sullivan County landfill in Monticello.

Finally, what of the statement that landfilling is “the absolute worst thing you can do environmentally with our garbage”? This too is in error.

According to the most comprehensive tool available for assessing the impacts of different waste diversion and disposal systems, long-hauling trash represents a negligible portion of the environmental and human health costs associated with waste disposal.

Those costs are highest for incineration, which are more than twice those for landfill, on average.

Note that these days, incineration is often positioned as “waste to energy,” making it sound like a net positive for the environment. This fig leaf enables those in the trash-burning business to qualify for tax credits — and to market their facilities as “renewable, carbon-negative sources of energy.”

Some legislators are keenly interested in building such a facility in Sullivan County. This would be a grave mistake — not just for residents’ health, our environment, and our tourist industry, but for the county’s finances, as well. Incinerators are heinously expensive to build, and they lock communities into costly long-term operating contracts. Trash isn’t the only thing that gets burned.