In answer to questions, the department’s representatives said that:

In answer to questions, the department’s representatives said that:

• Impermeable rubber liners are required in every trash trench to prevent leachate from escaping. A leachate collection system - piping to the core of the garbage mass - funnels out collected water for discharge after treatment, either onsite or at a municipal treatment plant.

• Any leachate escaping from this collection system would show up in monitoring wells ‘long before it would reach any private, individual wells” in the vicinity of the Stover tract. Then additional wells would be drilled to intercept the potential pollutants.

• Under current waste management standards, the distance between the bottom of the waste pile and the top of bedrock must be a minimum of five feet.

• The regional supervisor will inspect an operating landfill “every six weeks to two months.”

• The county is responsible for regular site monitoring. “Normally, this is done through a certified lab, and no lab is going to risk its certification by falsifying data,” Mr. Gregori said. Reports are filed with the Department of Waste Management. “And if, upon review of the findings, we suspect a problem, we send our own inspector out. ”

• Wien a landfill is closed, the dome shaped trash pile is covered with a clay cap, a layer of soil and vegetative cover to ensure that rain water runs off instead of penetrating the buried waste.

Resource recovery questioned

Asked if his department is doing anything to encourage localities to cooperate in building and running resource recovery facilities, Mr. Gregori called this approach a “nonsolution.” Burning the trash presents its own set of environmental problems: ash by-product which might have a high concentration of dangerous heavy metals and air pollution from the incineration process.

In addition, he said, the trash volume is reduced by only 80 percent