East Brunswick has been paid for hosting the landfill every year since 1985 — about $4.5 million in 2026. It has also been on the receiving end of recurring odour complaints documented from 1987 to 2019, a withdrawn plan to dig up old waste, two federal settlements and a school evacuation nearly four miles away. Both of those are the same story. And we could not find a published plan for what the mound becomes.

Part 4 of a four-part Eyes on EB series.

This is the last installment, and it is the one where the record stops being tidy.

Part 1 described what the mound is. Part 2 explained how it got so big. Part 3 established that the original landfill closed on schedule and a second one was built on top of it.

This part covers the arguments, the money and the ending — and the ending is the part I cannot give you, because the documents do not agree with each other and no public source reconciles them.

Two things are worth saying before we start.

This is not a case for the landfill and it is not a case against it. The record contains a county health director calling it probably the most environmentally sound landfill in New Jersey, and residents telling a State Senate committee they were being treated like guinea pigs. Both of those are primary sources. Both are honest accounts. An article that uses only one of them is not reporting.

And the people who work there are not the defendants in this story. Every criticism that follows is of a decision, a design or a policy. When the County’s own health director looked at this facility in 1985, what he recorded about the operators was “excellent cooperation.”

The odours were there in 1987

The 2018–19 odour crisis is the one most people remember. It was not the first.

The 1987 engineering evaluation — the same report Part 3 is built on — recorded the problem and diagnosed its cause in a single sentence:

At that point gas collection and flaring operated on Section 1 only. An application was pending for Section 2. For Section 3, nothing had been submitted at all.

Odour was not the only thing the engineers wrote down. The same evaluation documented litter, inadequate cover, and leachate seeps on the north and east slopes — the operating problems Part 2 flagged and left for this installment.

That is thirty-two years before the school evacuation, with the same mechanism named: gas control lagging behind filling.

1993

If you were going to pick one year in this landfill’s history to read closely, it would be 1993.

In April of that year alone, the Middlesex County Board of Health logged 173 odour complaints. For scale: the County Health Director logged ten in the six months to July 1985, and MCUA logged 183 across two months in late 2018.

That spring, EDI and MCUA applied to exhume and rebury old waste — approximately 738,000 cubic yards across 41 acres sitting outside the cut-off wall. The South River Environmental Commission demanded that the state reject the application. South River and Sayreville councils moved resolutions against it.

It was withdrawn. A citizen account filed with a legislative committee described how:

⚠ How much waste actually lies outside the cut-off wall is unresolved. The 1987 report calls it “small areas of previously deposited waste.” The 1993 acreage figures come from the citizens’ characterisation of the application, not from a document we hold. Those two accounts are far apart and we cannot close the gap.

And on May 26, 1993, the New Jersey Senate Environment Committee held a hearing in South River. As far as our research can establish, it was the first legislative hearing held specifically on this landfill — the 1985 hearing in Part 2 was about interdistrict waste flow generally.

The committee’s chair opened it this way:

What the 1993 hearing was actually about

The specific grievance was sludge. MCUA was using a sludge-derived product as daily cover on the landfill, and the smell was attributed to it.

A legislator told the committee that Edgeboro was “the only landfill in the State of New Jersey, and perhaps in EPA Region II, that uses sludge as daily cover,” and relayed a state assistant commissioner’s assessment from the previous week: “they are not even using it as cover. The cover has become so thick that it cannot even be justified as being used as cover. In fact, the MCUA is dumping sludge daily onto the landfill in violation of State law.” The same witness said residents were being treated “as guinea pigs.”

⚠ Those are legislator claims made in testimony, not findings. We have found no violation notice supporting the “in violation of State law” characterisation, and we are not going to present one as established.

What the state said in response is documented, and it mattered. Deputy Commissioner Jeanne M. Fox told the committee that complaints “have resulted primarily from the use of the sludge-derived product as cover on the landfill,” that the department would require odour-control procedures “including the use of a deodorizing agent” — and then made a commitment:

A state scientist also gave the committee a health finding. Dr. Iclal Atay of the NJDEP Bureau of New Source Review testified that with the flares operating, “the cancer risks would be less than one-in-a-million for those substances that we have done the calculations for.” He named the odour agents as “hydrogen sulfide, mercaptans,” which “give you a feeling of illness; however, as soon as you move away from the odor, that feeling of sickness stops” — while noting the agency was still testing for substances that “may cause serious illnesses.”

⭐ Hold onto both of those. They come back in 2019 and 2024, almost unchanged.

One document we do not have

Testimony filed with that committee quoted an internal state memorandum, written by a departmental director of legislative affairs to the Commissioner, about a March 1993 meeting in South River. As quoted, it characterised residents as “an interesting lot” of “low socio-economic status” and “non-technical, non-intellectually sophisticated people,” described local officials as “mavericks” and “renegades,” and advised the Commissioner to keep his “distance.”

⛔ We do not hold that memo. Every phrase above reaches us second-hand, through a citizen statement filed with a legislative committee. We are recording that it was quoted into the public record of a Senate hearing — which is a fact — and explicitly not presenting it as a document we have read.

The same facility, described two ways, eight years apart

Put the two accounts side by side, because this is the most useful thing in the entire environmental record.

Neither of these cancels the other, and it is a mistake to try to make them.

The 1985 letter is describing engineering — a cut-off wall, a leachate system, a gas system, cooperative operators — and it is accurate about those things. The 1993 testimony is an account of what it was like to live beside a facility whose volume and practices had changed. We are not in a position to certify every characterisation in it — but the complaint counts behind it are official, and the state’s own response treated the underlying problem as real.

A facility can be well engineered for its era and overwhelmed, and it can be run cooperatively and produce a smell that reaches the next town. The record says all of those things at once.

1994: the odour gets written into an enforceable order

The 1993 hearing had a documented result, and it is the part of this history that seems to have been forgotten.

On December 23, 1994, after contested litigation, an Administrative Consent Order was executed between MCUA and the state department — OAL Docket No. ESW-08866-93S. It governs the sludge-derived product in exactly the structure Deputy Commissioner Fox had described eighteen months earlier:

• daily cover capped at 500 cubic yards a day, about nine inches per lift
• intermediate cover capped at 200 cubic yards a day at a 50:50 sludge-to-soil mix
• if odour unreasonably interferes with the enjoyment of life or property, MCUA must mix 50:50
• if odour persists, MCUA must cease all use of the product

The order terminated when the facility’s permits were renewed, with its conditions carried into the permit itself.

Odour was an enforceable permit condition at this landfill a quarter of a century before the 2018–19 crisis.

2010: two federal settlements

Part 3 quoted the EPA’s finding that the stacked design “contributed to challenging environmental compliance issues.” This is the enforcement that came with it.

In July 2010, the EPA settled with Edgeboro Disposal, Inc., Edgeboro Inc. and two gas-system operators over Clean Air Act violations at the closed landfill. Penalties were $750,000, and EDI built a new $6 million landfill gas collection and control system. The agency had determined that the old system was inadequate, that excessive landfill gas was escaping, that pollution control devices were not being operated properly and that various monitoring was not being done.

In August 2010, the EPA settled separately with MCUA and two more gas operators over the active landfill. Those defendants collectively paid a civil penalty of more than $1.3 million. MCUA installed 19 additional gas collection wells in its newest cell and agreed to a surface methane monitoring plan.

Two settlements, two months apart, two sets of defendants — because, as Part 3 explained, there are two landfills here and in 2010 the federal government was still treating them as having different owners.

2018–19: the school, and an irony

In December 2018, a school in North Brunswick was evacuated on suspicion of a gas leak.

There was no leak. The smell was the landfill, almost four miles away.

From November 2018, MCUA documented 183 odour-related complaints, including landfill gas smelled twice on George Street in New Brunswick. At a packed public meeting in January 2019, MCUA’s executive director attributed the odour to hydrogen sulfide and gave two causes: higher than normal rainfall in 2018 seeping into the waste mass, and drilling and construction inside the mound.

The drilling was for a new odour control system.

⚠ Those explanations are the operator’s account, given at a public meeting, and not independently verified here. He cited readings of five parts per billion against “an anticipated regulatory limit of 30 ppb,” saying “We are operating well below what we perceive these limits to be” — and the hedge in that phrasing is his, not ours. He also said “The rotten egg smell is bad for your nose, but very little else.”

Residents at the same meeting disputed how complaints were being scored. One said that when residents called, inspectors visited and rated an odour a 1 or 2 where the residents rated it a 4 or 5.

The odour control system was completed in summer 2019 — about 20,000 linear feet of piping around the mound’s perimeter with vaporiser units. ⚠ MCUA describes it as the first of its kind in New Jersey and describes it as effective; those are the operator’s claims about its own installation.

⭐ Note what carried across thirty-one years. In 1993 a state scientist named hydrogen sulfide as the odour agent and gave a less-than-one-in-a-million cancer risk finding. In 2024, MCUA reported a facility-wide risk assessment against that same one-in-a-million threshold, and its executive director had named hydrogen sulfide in 2019. ⚠ The 2024 figure is MCUA’s summary of its own consultant’s report, which we have not obtained.

The money

East Brunswick has received host community benefits since 1985, under a state law providing a minimum of one dollar per ton to the host municipality.

Here is the series, from the Township’s own bond disclosures and MCUA’s budgets:

• 1986 — $3,063,000
• 1987 — $1,094,302 ⚠ a sharp, unexplained dip
• 1988 — $2,300,000 · 1989 — $3,150,000 · 1990 — $3,560,000
• 1991 through 2001 — $4,600,000 every single year
• 2002 — $4,850,000 · 2005 — $4,837,998 · 2008 — $4,193,238
• 2009 — $5,031,945 ⭐ the highest single year in the series
• 2010 — $3,728,584 ⭐ a fall of about 26% in one year
• 2014 — $4,282,501 · 2019 — $4,340,340
• 2026 — $4,537,000 budgeted

Two of those need flagging honestly. The 1987 collapse to about a million dollars is not explained by anything we hold — it coincides with the year the private landfill reached capacity and the County restructured control, but no document connects them. And the 26% drop in 2010, straight after the highest year on record, is not explained either. We looked.

And an eleven-year run at exactly $4,600,000 is not what a per-ton payment produces on its own. Something was fixing that number. We could not establish what.

The “$3 million or $4 million” question

If you have heard officials describe this payment, you may have heard two different numbers. Both are correct, and the reason is bookkeeping rather than disagreement.

MCUA budgets one combined figure for East Brunswick. The Township books it as two separate revenue lines — a “Host Benefit Fee MCUA” line and a separate “MCUA Fees – Added” line. In 2025 those two lines were $3,090,000 and $1,416,870, which is $4,506,870 — against MCUA’s single budgeted figure of $4,507,000.

So a council member describing “about $3 million a year” is quoting the first line. A mayor describing “about four million dollars a year” is quoting the total. Neither is wrong.

Who else gets paid, and who does not

East Brunswick is not the only municipality receiving money. MCUA budgets a separate adjoining host community benefit to three neighbours:

⭐ All three adjoining payments fall while East Brunswick’s rises.

And one city appears to receive nothing. In 2019 it was reported that New Brunswick — less than a mile from the landfill — received no payment at all. MCUA’s 2025 and 2026 budgets list adjoining host community benefits for Edison, Sayreville and South River only. We found no source establishing a payment to New Brunswick.

MCUA also pays $3,500,000 a year to the County as an implementing agency fee and $2,750,000 to the County improvement authority for recycling. Tipping fees rose over 2022–26 from $70 to $75 a ton at the first tier and $73 to $78 at the second.

Why East Brunswick wants the landfill to continue

It would be easy to assume the answer is simply the $4.5 million. The record gives at least four reasons, and the money is only one of them.

1. Proximity is worth money on the other side of the ledger too. The Township is also a customer — it pays MCUA tipping fees every month. As a council member put it in 2026: “other towns that are further away from the dump, their increases are higher… because their trucks have to drive to the landfill. So, it is a benefit to us that it’s close.”

2. The host community benefit. About $4.5 million a year.

3. The landfill is load-bearing in East Brunswick’s affordable-housing position. ⭐ In January 2025 the Township removed 129.5 of 174 developable acres from its Round 4 obligation calculation — with page after page of the supporting appendix labelled “MCUA Property – Landfill” and “MCUA Property – Wetlands & Landfill.”

4. The Township runs its own recycling and compost centre on the same campus.

The Council’s own position, on camera in April 2026, is not ambiguous: “We need to keep that landfill available as long as possible.”

⛔ One premise we went looking for and could not support: that East Brunswick planned around a closure that never came. We found no evidence of it. The Township’s bond disclosures told investors the revenue would continue, and its governing body says out loud that it wants the landfill’s life extended.

What closure actually involves

Closure is not switching something off. It is a construction project followed by a thirty-year obligation.

• A six-layer final cap over the mound.
• Thirty years of post-closure maintenance and monitoring after closure.
• $84.2 million recorded as closure and post-closure care liabilities at the end of 2023, against total costs estimated at approximately $137 million — up from around $99 million as recently as 2021.
• $84,249,099 held in restricted cash and investments against it.
• $77.5 million of reserve and closure funding in the 2026 five-year capital plan, with major spending scheduled into 2031.
• Edgeboro I is a live, shared obligation. Closure and post-closure of the closed landfill underneath is still shared with Edgeboro Disposal, Inc., funded principally from escrowed money established by its owners out of tipping fees.
• Gas collection continues after closure. MCUA already collects gas from a closed regional landfill as well as the active one.
• Partial closure is already happening — side-slope closure projects were built in 2021.

We could not find a published plan for what the mound becomes

This is a real gap, and it is worth naming plainly.

We found no published plan for the end use of the site. In 2019 a regional news outlet reported that officials had no public plan for what would happen after closure. Nothing we located since contradicts that.

⚠ Closed landfills elsewhere have become parks, solar arrays and open space. None of that is documented for Edgeboro, and we are not going to imply it is. What we can say is that a 247-acre landform inside a 315-acre site, in a township with very little developable land left, will eventually stop taking waste — and that no public document we found says what happens then.

So when does it actually end?

Here is where the record refuses to resolve, and the honest thing is to show you the disagreement rather than pick a year.

Three figures, from the same operator, that do not fit together:

1. “Through 2030.” MCUA’s audited financial statements state that a September 2017 permit approval allows operation of the landfill through 2030. That language repeats unchanged across the 2020, 2021 and 2023 audits. It matches the County’s own 2016 public notice, which said the 55-foot height increase “will extend the life of the Landfill until about year 2030.” 2. Vertical filling beginning in 2028. MCUA’s September 2024 presentation states that a vertical capacity increase in the Solid Waste Facility Permit is “anticipated to begin in 2028.” Its August 2024 filings describe raising total design capacity from 18,856,092 to 21,656,092 megagrams — an increase of about 15% — pending state approval. 3. Closure spending scheduled into 2031. The 2026 capital plan carries $77.5 million of reserve and closure funding with major spend running into 2031.

A vertical expansion that starts filling in 2028 is hard to square with a landfill that stops accepting waste in 2030. No public source we found reconciles them. ⛔ And we are not going to calculate a year ourselves — the airspace-versus-mass distinction makes that arithmetic unsafe, and a number we invented would be worse than an honest gap.

There is also a nearer date worth knowing: the MCUA disposal agreements expire on December 31, 2026.

Separately, East Brunswick told bond investors in at least four Official Statements — 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2020 — in identical words, that it would receive host community benefits “for the next twenty years which is the life expectancy of the landfill.” Read literally that is 2034, then 2035, then 2037, then 2040. ⚠ That is almost certainly un-updated boilerplate rather than four separate forecasts, and it should not be read as officials moving a goalpost. What it does show is that the Township never reconciled its own investor disclosure with the County’s figure.

What this series establishes

Across four installments, from permits, engineering reports, hearing transcripts, audits, budgets and federal enforcement records:

The mound on Edgeboro Road is two landfills. A private one that operated from 1954, was capped and closed, and a county one permitted in 1991 and opened in 1992 on top of it.

East Brunswick did not choose to become a regional disposal site. Three Middlesex County landfills went out of service inside about eighteen months, and state emergency orders sent the waste to the one that was left. The County litigated against those orders and lost.

The original landfill did not operate past its legal end date. That date was written into a permit in January 1984.

The stacked design had costs, and the federal regulator said so in writing. It also roughly doubled the site’s usable life, which is why it was chosen.

Odour is the through-line of the record — identified by engineers in 1987, raised at a Senate hearing in 1993, written into an enforceable order in 1994, and still the subject of 183 complaints in 2018–19.

The facility has been described honestly in incompatible ways by people who were there. Both descriptions are in the record and both belong in it.

The money is real, it is substantial, and parts of it are unexplained — including a 26% single-year fall that no document we hold accounts for.

And the end is not settled. The operator’s own documents point at 2030, 2028 and 2031, and nothing reconciles them. We found no published plan for what the site becomes afterward.

⛔ We are not filing a public records request off any of this. Eyes on EB reserves those for evidence of wrongdoing, concealment or a serious accountability problem. What we found instead is a seventy-year institutional history that is more complicated, and considerably more interesting, than the version most of us carry around — including the version I had before I started reading.

If you take one thing from the series, make it this. The mountain on Edgeboro Road is not a mystery and it is not a scandal. It is the physical record of decisions that were made in public, are written down, and can be read.

THE SERIES

• PART 1 — What Is That Mountain on Edgeboro Road? — Read part 1
• PART 2 — How Edgeboro Got So Big — Read part 2
• PART 3 — The Landfill That Actually Did Close — Read part 3
• PART 4 — The Fights, the Money and What Happens When the Mountain Stops Growing — Current installment

Eyes on EB builds its reporting from original records. This installment draws on the transcript of the May 26, 1993 New Jersey Senate Environment Committee hearing on the Edgeboro Landfill; the April 1987 Edgeboro Landfill Evaluation prepared by Malcolm Pirnie, Inc.; the December 23, 1994 Administrative Consent Order, OAL Docket No. ESW-08866-93S; the NJDEP Solid Waste Facility Permit for the Middlesex County Landfill; United States Environmental Protection Agency enforcement releases of July and August 2010; MCUA audited financial statements and adopted budgets; MCUA’s September 2024 public information session and its 2024 Title V public notice; Township of East Brunswick Official Statements, budgets and council records; the Township’s January 2025 affordable-housing filing; and contemporaneous journalism. Where our sources disagree, where a figure is an estimate, or where a claim is an operator’s account of its own performance, we have said so.

The original Edgeboro landfill had a legal end date written into a state permit in January 1984: December 31, 1992. It did not operate beyond it. It was capped, and it is still there — underneath a second landfill, separately permitted, built on top of it.

Part 3 of a four-part Eyes on EB series.

This is the part I got wrong before I read the documents.

Like most people who have wondered about the mound on Edgeboro Road, I had absorbed a version of the story that goes roughly: they said it was going to close, and it never did. It is an easy thing to believe. The landfill has been there my whole life. It is bigger now than it was.

It is also not what the record says.

The original Edgeboro landfill — the private one, run by Edgeboro Disposal, Inc. — had a hard termination date written into a state permit eight years before the transition happened. It closed. It was capped. It is still there, underneath, sealed.

The landfill operating on Edgeboro Road today is a different landfill, with a different owner, a different permit and a different facility number, built beside and directly on top of the closed one.

Both of those sentences are true at the same time. Getting them straight is the whole point of this installment, because almost every confusion about Edgeboro — including mine — comes from collapsing two landfills into one.

The permit that named a day

On January 30, 1984, the NJDEP Division of Waste Management issued an Amended Certificate of Approved Registration and Engineering Design Approval to Edgeboro Disposal, Inc., Facility Registration No. 1204A.

Condition 7 is the sentence this whole series turns on:

The certificate then closes two doors that a reader might reasonably expect to be open. First:

And then, in plainer language than regulators usually use:

Two other conditions matter. Condition 5 set the maximum elevation at 87 feet above sea level, including final cover. Condition 32 required a closure plan within ninety days.

The certificate was signed for Director Dr. Marwan M. Sadat, P.E., with Deputy Director Lino F. Pereira, P.E.

This is not a forecast, a projection or an aspiration. It is a binding permit condition with a date in it. But the language is worth reading exactly. The certificate set two triggers and ended the operation on whichever came first — the calendar date, or design capacity. And it left one door open, requiring written approval from the Division of Waste Management for any landfilling beyond December 31, 1992. That is an extension somebody would have had to grant in writing, not a deadline that could quietly drift.

From January 1984 onward, the private Edgeboro landfill operated under a fixed end date it could not pass on its own.

What “capacity” actually meant

The 1984 certificate set two separate triggers and said whichever came first would end the operation: a calendar date, and reaching design capacity under an engineering design dated May 1981.

That second trigger is where a lot of misunderstanding lives, so it is worth being precise. “Capacity” at Edgeboro was expressed as a height ceiling — a permitted final elevation. Reaching it does not shut a landfill the way running out of fuel stops a car. It triggers a decision: the operator either stops, or applies to change the ceiling.

We can show that in the record, because it happened before 1984. The original permitted ceiling for Sections 1 through 4 was 87 feet above sea level. Section 4 was never filled — and through negotiation with NJDEP, its permitted volume was traded for additional height over Sections 1, 2 and 3, taking the permitted elevation to roughly 110 feet by 1986.

⛔ One caution, because this trips up almost everyone including me: these are elevations above mean sea level, not heights above the surrounding ground. The site sits in the Raritan and South River lowlands, so the two numbers are close but not the same, and no source we have found gives a height above grade.

There is also a document we do not have. The May 1981 Revised Engineering Design — the thing that legally defined “design capacity” for the original landfill — is not in our hands. It is the document that would tell us exactly where the finish line was drawn. We have recorded that as an open question rather than guessing at it.

The 1987 crisis — and the sentence in the same report

By 1987 Middlesex County had a problem it had commissioned engineers to describe.

The April 1987 evaluation prepared by Malcolm Pirnie, Inc. for the County and the MCUA opens with a warning:

Read alone, that line looks like the origin of the folk story. Engineers said June 1987; it is decades later and the landfill is still there.

But it does not stand alone. In the Conclusions of the same report, the same engineers wrote:

The people who produced the June 1987 date told the County, in the same document, that they did not expect the landfill to close. They were describing a permit ceiling being reached, not a facility being switched off — and they said so.

That matters for how this story gets told. A “they promised it would close and it never did” framing is not supported by this record, and we are not going to write it.

⚠ One honest gap: whether users actually petitioned the courts, as the engineers predicted they would, is something we have not established. We looked. We do not have it.

Why closing the old landfill was the first step to keeping the site

Here is the mechanism that makes the whole 1991–92 transition make sense, and it is genuinely counterintuitive.

Under New Jersey’s Environmental Cleanup Responsibility Act, the County could not simply buy an operating landfill. The 1987 evaluation spells out the sequence:

Read that again with the folk story in mind. Closing the old landfill was not the opposite of keeping a landfill on Edgeboro Road. It was step one of the process that produced the one operating there now.

This is also why the 1984 certificate’s Condition 32 — a closure plan within ninety days — turns out to matter so much. Three years later that plan still was not approved; the 1987 report records only that “NJDEP has received and is reviewing a Closure Plan.” An approved closure plan was a precondition of the sale contemplated in the 1987 report.

⛔ We have never seen the Edgeboro I closure plan. It governs the capped mound underneath the working landfill. That is one of the larger gaps in what we hold.

⚠ One qualification. The passage above describes the route the County’s engineers laid out in 1987 — a sale. What actually happened in 1991 was condemnation, which is not the same transaction. Whether the ECRA sequence applied in the same way to a taking is a legal question the documents we hold do not answer.

The valleys

Before any of that could happen, the County had to decide what shape a future landfill would take. The 1987 report put the choice in one sentence:

The engineers modelled it both ways.

Fill the valleys — treat the site as one landform, old and new joined — and at a maximum elevation of 160 feet you get about 23.9 million cubic yards and an estimated 33 years of life.

Keep the mounds separate — a new landfill hydraulically isolated from the old one — and at 140 feet, close to the practical maximum for a separate mound, you get about 11 million cubic yards and roughly 15.4 years.

Filling the valleys roughly doubled the life of the site.

The County did not keep the mounds separate. And that decision — made on volume and years — is the decision that produced the thing Edgeboro is now physically known for.

What actually happened, 1988 to 1992

The transition took four years and is documented in pieces from different sources. Laid end to end:

• January 1988 — East Brunswick’s own bond disclosure to investors states that “The MCUA took over operation of the landfill from the investor owners as of January 1988.”
• 1991 — MCUA exercises eminent domain over the private landfill, securing the right “to landfill solid waste around, next to, and over the top of the former Edgeboro landfill.”
• May 10, 1991 — NJDEP issues a Solid Waste Facility Permit for the Middlesex County Landfill, Facility No. 1204001116, a Class I Sanitary Landfill on Block 834 in East Brunswick. This is a new permit for a new facility, not a renewal of 1204A.
• 1991 — NJDEP and the Board of Public Utilities issue an order “requiring Edgeboro Disposal Inc. to close the Edgeboro I landfill.”
• October 10, 1991 — the County Solid Waste Division and EDI execute an agreement sharing closure and post-closure responsibility for Edgeboro I, funded principally from escrowed tipping-fee money approved by the BPU.
• February 5, 1992 — the Middlesex County Landfill opens, after about six months of construction, with three cells, each with its own double liner, leachate collection and secondary leak detection.

Note where the 1991 closure order falls: inside the final eighteen months before the 1984 permit’s own December 31, 1992 termination date. The two are almost certainly connected. ⚠ No document we hold states the relationship, so we are not going to assert one.

What we can say is this. The order was obeyed. Edgeboro I is the capped mound underneath. And the eight-year-old permit condition and the transition landed in the same window.

Two landfills, one address

The active facility is legally and physically distinct from the closed one:

⛔ The names will not help you tell them apart. In law and in contract the active MCUA facility is also called “Edgeboro Landfill” — that is the name used in N.J.A.C. 7:26-6.5(m) and in the MCUA disposal agreements. The only reliable way to know which landfill a document is talking about is the date and the described owner.

The stacked arrangement has been named by people on both sides of it. A legislator, testifying in 1993:

⚠ That “nation’s only” claim is a legislator’s assertion in testimony. We have not verified it and we are not adopting it — but the term he used is the contemporaneous name for the design.

The federal regulator later used a different word for the same thing, and was blunter about its consequences. The EPA, in 2010:

That is not a small statement, and it should not be read past. The federal environmental regulator has explicitly identified the stacked design as a contributing cause of compliance difficulty at this site. The enforcement that came with that finding — two Clean Air Act settlements in 2010 — is Part 4’s subject, and we will get to it there rather than skate over it here.

What MCUA acquired is not settled — and we are going to say so

There is a question at the centre of the transition that we cannot answer from the documents we hold: what, exactly, did MCUA acquire in 1991?

The evidence points in more than one direction.

Toward a full transfer: the two permits cover essentially the same Block 834 parcels. The 1984 certificate states that “This registration is transferable with the approval of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection” — meaning the land and the operating registration were separate assets that could move separately. The 1987 roadmap contemplated a purchase. East Brunswick told bond investors MCUA “took over operation” in 1988. And MCUA exercised eminent domain in 1991.

Against a clean break: in 2010 — nineteen years after the condemnation — the EPA still identified Edgeboro Disposal, Inc. and Edgeboro Inc. among “the owner and operators of the Edgeboro landfill,” and settled with them separately from MCUA. The old landfill had its own gas system and its own Clean Air Act liability. MCUA’s audited financial statements still describe Edgeboro I closure as a shared responsibility with EDI.

⛔ So this article does not say MCUA purchased the old landfill, and it does not say MCUA simply inherited it. Something real happened in 1991 involving condemnation, a new permit and a shared closure agreement. The precise legal shape of it is unresolved in our record, and reporting it as unresolved is more useful than picking whichever version reads better.

We looked for the answer. We did not find a document that gives it.

The mound kept growing — but through decisions, on the record

None of the above means the landfill on Edgeboro Road stopped getting bigger. It means the growth happened through a sequence of decisions that are documented and datable, rather than through a deadline quietly slipping.

The permitted elevation ladder:

• 87 feet above sea level — the original ceiling for Sections 1 through 4
• about 110 feet — by 1986, after trading Section 4’s volume for height over Sections 1, 2 and 3
• 165 feet — set in the March 6, 2000 Solid Waste Facility Permit, condition B.I.6
• 220 feet — approved in 2016, an increase of 55 feet providing roughly 7,900,000 additional cubic yards, with explicitly no change to the footprint

That last one is worth pausing on, because somebody had described it thirty-one years earlier. In Part 2 we quoted Freeholder David B. Crabiel telling an Assembly committee in August 1985 that if permits for “vertical and horizontal” expansion were granted, “that landfill could have gone on for 31 years.”

He used the word vertical in 1985. The vertical expansion was approved in 2016.

We are not claiming a connection between those two facts. There is no document linking them and it would be easy — and wrong — to make one. But it is a real feature of this record that the mechanism which eventually extended the landfill’s life was named out loud, in public testimony, three decades before it was used.

What this part does and doesn’t establish

It establishes that the original Edgeboro landfill had a legal end date and did not operate beyond it. December 31, 1992 was written into a permit in January 1984 and was expressly insulated from changes to the County plan. A 1991 order to close Edgeboro I was issued and obeyed. The mound was capped.

It establishes that the landfill operating today is a separate, separately permitted facility — Facility No. 1204001116, first permitted May 10, 1991, opened February 5, 1992 — built beside and on top of the closed one.

It establishes that, on the County’s own 1987 advice, closing the old landfill was a precondition of acquiring the site — not a promise broken by keeping a landfill there.

It does not establish that the stacked design was without cost. The EPA has said in writing that it contributed to challenging environmental compliance issues, and that finding stands on its own in this article.

It does not establish what MCUA acquired in 1991, and we have said why we cannot close that question with the documents we hold.

And it does not settle where the finish line was originally drawn. The May 1981 Revised Engineering Design that defined “design capacity,” and the Edgeboro I closure plan that governs the capped mound underneath everything, are both documents we have never seen.

What the record does support is a cleaner and less satisfying story than the one I arrived with. One landfill closed on schedule. Another opened on top of it. Both are true.

NEXT: PART 4 — The Fights, the Money and What Happens When the Mountain Stops Growing

The objections did not begin in the 1990s — Part 2 is full of them. What changed was who was making them, and in what volume. In April 1993 alone the County Board of Health logged 173 odour complaints. That year also brought the first legislative hearing held specifically on this landfill, and a proposal to dig up hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of old waste that was withdrawn under public pressure.

Part 4 also follows the money, which is larger and stranger than most residents realise, and ends where the record actually ends: with a closure date that the available documents do not agree on.

Part 4 is the last installment.

THE SERIES

• PART 1 — What Is That Mountain on Edgeboro Road? — Read part 1
• PART 2 — How Edgeboro Got So Big — Read part 2
• PART 3 — The Landfill That Actually Did Close — Current installment
• PART 4 — The Fights, the Money and What Happens When the Mountain Stops Growing — Coming soon

Eyes on EB builds its reporting from original records. This installment draws on the NJDEP Amended Certificate of Approved Registration for Edgeboro Disposal, Inc., Facility Registration No. 1204A, January 30, 1984; the April 1987 Edgeboro Landfill Evaluation prepared by Malcolm Pirnie, Inc. for the County of Middlesex and the MCUA, including its appendices and Tables 4-1 and 4-2; the NJDEP Solid Waste Facility Permit for the Middlesex County Landfill, Facility No. 1204001116; MCUA audited financial statements; Township of East Brunswick Official Statements; the transcript of the May 26, 1993 New Jersey Senate Environment Committee hearing; and United States Environmental Protection Agency enforcement releases of 2010. Where our sources disagree, or where a question is unresolved, we have said so.

East Brunswick did not choose to take in seven counties’ garbage. A slope collapse in Old Bridge, a court order, and a series of state emergency orders took the truck traffic from a few hundred a day to well over a thousand — and Middlesex County went to court to stop it, and lost.

Part 2 of a four-part Eyes on EB series.

Part 1 described what the mound on Edgeboro Road actually is: a quarry that became a landfill in 1954, and then two landfills stacked on top of each other, engineered in layers and wrapped in monitoring equipment.

This part answers the question that follows naturally from it. How does a township of this size end up with that?

Before I went into the records, I assumed the answer involved a decision. Somebody — the operator, the township, the county — must at some point have looked at a map and decided to build a very large regional landfill in East Brunswick.

That is not what the record shows.

What the record shows is a landfill that was serving local needs, three other disposal sites in Middlesex County that stopped operating within about eighteen months of each other, and a state agency that responded by directing everybody else’s garbage to the one facility still open. Middlesex County objected, went to the courts, and did not prevail.

Most of what follows comes from a public hearing held on August 23, 1985, in the Middlesex County Administration Building in New Brunswick, before the New Jersey Assembly’s Agriculture and Environment Committee. The subject was “solid waste management and interdistrict waste flow orders.” The transcript runs 76 pages, and Edgeboro is named 35 times.

The numbers, first

The 1987 engineering evaluation prepared for the county and the MCUA contains, in an appendix, the tonnage Edgeboro accepted year by year. Here is the series:

• 1973 — 328,000 tons
• 1974 — 357,750
• 1975 — 367,500
• 1976 — 348,780
• 1977 — 468,670
• 1978, 1979, 1980 — not reported
• 1981 — 626,920
• 1982 — 914,860
• 1983 — 1,003,400
• 1984 — 1,317,450 (the appendix notes: “4/84, Global landfill closed”)
• 1985 — 2,261,100 (the appendix notes: “4/85, ILR landfill closed”)
• 1986 — 2,586,900 tons

Two honest caveats before anyone leans on those figures.

Three years are simply missing. The appendix records 1978, 1979 and 1980 as “Not reported.” There is no number.

And nothing before late 1986 was weighed. The same page carries a note that is easy to skip past: “Scales at Edgeboro Landfill constructed and operational Fall 1986.” Everything above that line came from the operator’s own monthly facility reports, supplied through the county. It is the best record that exists, and it is what the county’s own engineers used. It is not a scale reading.

With those caveats stated: the site took roughly 328,000 tons in 1973 and 2,586,900 tons in 1986. Whatever the measurement error, the direction and scale of that change are not in doubt — and the appendix itself tells you, in its comments column, what happened in the two years that mattered most.

Where it was coming from

By the mid-1980s Edgeboro was no longer a local landfill in any meaningful sense.

The 1987 evaluation puts it plainly: in five years the facility had gone from “a facility serving the needs of the local residents and area municipalities of central Middlesex County to a regional disposal site accepting non-hazardous wastes from seven New Jersey counties and from portions of New York State.”

The breakdown for 1986: about 88 percent from Middlesex, Morris, Somerset and Union counties. About 1 percent from Bergen, Essex and Hudson.

And about 11 percent from New York State.

That is worth sitting with. Roughly a ninth of what went into the mound that year did not come from New Jersey at all.

What happened in April 1984

Middlesex County had three landfills operating. Freeholder David B. Crabiel described the arrangement to the Assembly committee in 1985: “Approximately two years ago, we had three landfill operations: Global in Old Bridge, ILR in Edison, and Edgeboro in East Brunswick. Both the county and DEP were aware of the ultimate closure of Global and ILR.”

Then one of them failed. Not gradually — physically.

A 1988 report by the New Jersey State Department of Health records what happened at Global Landfill in Old Bridge:

A face of the landfill three hundred feet across gave way, broke through a dike and pushed into the wetlands beside it. A court shut the facility on April 17.

Crabiel’s summary to the committee was shorter: “Global was closed prematurely due to a collapse which resulted in the flow from that facility being directed into Edgeboro and ILR.”

A year later the second one went. “The DEP brought suit against ILR and others to force the closure of the ILR facility over a year ago, but made no contingency plans upon its closure. A similar situation arose at Hamm’s Landfill.”

Edgeboro was the last one standing.

The redirect

This is the part of the story that changes how the whole thing reads, and it is worth quoting at length, because it is a county official speaking on the record to a legislative committee about a state agency.

Since 1982, as Assemblyman Frank M. Pelly of District 18 explained to the same committee, the Department of Environmental Protection had shared with the Board of Public Utilities the authority to direct the flow of solid waste between counties. When a landfill closed, the state could order the waste somewhere else.

It ordered it to East Brunswick.

The effect on the site was immediate and enormous. Crabiel again:

From about 1,800 tons a day to 6,000 or 7,000. Assemblyman Pelly gave the committee the composition of that flow: “the Edgeboro Landfill accepts approximately 7000 tons per day of solid waste, of which 4400 tons, or 63%, originate from three other counties.”

Nearly two-thirds of what was arriving at the gate was not Middlesex County’s garbage.

What that looked like from Edgeboro Road

The traffic figures in the 1985 testimony are the ones I keep coming back to, because they describe something residents would have simply watched happen.

Depending which ends of those ranges you take, that is between three and nearly five times as many trucks, in about a year.

Pelly continued: “These trucks have had a significantly adverse environmental and economic impact on the area. The dust, stench, and unsightly appearance of literally hundreds of garbage trucks lined along public roads has had a substantially adverse effect on the area businesses. The local infrastructure has been weakened as State, county, and local roads have been subjected to the constant battering inflicted by multi-ton vehicles. It has been necessary to employ additional law enforcement personnel to cope with the congestion and enormous traffic problems created by this amount of trucks.”

The county health director agreed — and said whose fault it wasn’t

There is a letter in the appendix of the 1987 engineering evaluation that I think is the single most useful document in this part of the story, because it comes from the regulator whose job was to inspect the place.

On July 22, 1985 — a month before the Assembly hearing — Laszlo Szabo, Director of the Middlesex County Department of Health, wrote to Gregory C. Fehrenbach, then the Administrator of the Township of East Brunswick.

His assessment of the facility itself was not what I expected:

He reported that his department’s sampling showed “no migration of toxic chemicals off-site,” and that between January and late July 1985 the county’s air program had logged ten documented complaints.

And then he identified the problem:

He listed three options for the county. Suspend the environmental regulations — which he did not think anyone would take responsibility for. Issue summonses almost daily — which he called “silly” given that the county had, in his words, “excellent cooperation from the operators.” Or reduce the number of trucks, which is what he recommended.

That is the county’s own health director, in writing, telling East Brunswick’s administrator that the engineering was sound, the operators were cooperative, and the problem was the volume the state had sent.

It is worth being careful about what that letter is and isn’t. It is one regulator’s assessment at one moment, it is not a measurement of everything, and Part 4 covers a later period in which residents and their legislators described the facility in very different terms. Both belong in the record. Neither erases the other.

The counterfactual nobody got to test

Buried in the question-and-answer portion of the 1985 hearing is an exchange that reads differently once you know what eventually happened at Edgeboro.

Freeholder Crabiel, describing what the county had lost:

Two things in that sentence.

The first is the loss. On the county’s own account, redirected waste turned roughly a decade of remaining capacity into something far shorter.

The second is the word vertical. In August 1985, a Middlesex County freeholder floated the idea of permitting Edgeboro to grow upward rather than outward, and estimated it could extend the site’s life to about thirty-one years.

Thirty-one years from 1985 is 2016. Part 3 picks that thread up.

What it was costing

The 1985 testimony also put a price on it. Pelly told the committee that the county would be forced to build more expensive disposal capacity years earlier than planned:

His conclusion assigned responsibility squarely:

That is one side of an argument, made by an elected official from the affected district, and it should be read as such. But the underlying mechanism he was describing — counties that had not built their own capacity, and a state that solved the problem by pointing trucks at the counties that had — is not in dispute in the record. It is what the hearing was called to examine.

How fast the clock was running

By the time of the hearing, the horizon had collapsed.

Pelly told the committee that “In 1983, it was estimated that Edgeboro had sufficient capacity to serve the disposal needs of Middlesex County until at least 1989.”

Two years later, that estimate was gone: “At present, it is projected that all of Middlesex County’s remaining landfill disposal capacity will be exhausted in less than two years.”

Two years from August 1985 is the middle of 1987 — which is, almost to the month, when the engineering evaluation the county commissioned would independently conclude the site was about to hit its permitted capacity.

Then the state changed course

The thing that saved Edgeboro is the same lever that had overwhelmed it: waste flow.

The 1987 evaluation records that NJDEP required Morris, Somerset and Union Counties to amend their solid waste management plans and send their waste elsewhere — and states the reason plainly: “In efforts to preserve the remaining life of the landfill and in recognition of the coming crisis.”

All three amendments were approved. The transfer facilities were anticipated to be operating in 1988.

The engineers estimated the effect: restricting Edgeboro to Middlesex County waste alone would cut the incoming volume “by more than 50 percent.”

It did more than that over time. The landfill on Edgeboro Road today takes in roughly 500,000 tons a year — a little under a fifth of the 1986 figure — and the waste it takes today is Middlesex County’s own, from all 25 municipalities in the county.

Those few years in the middle of the 1980s dramatically accelerated how quickly Edgeboro was filling. The rate slowed after the state redirected out-of-county waste elsewhere.

What this part does and doesn’t establish

It establishes that the surge had identifiable causes: a landfill that collapsed and was closed by court order, a second closed by state lawsuit, a third in the same position, and emergency state orders that sent the resulting waste to the one remaining site in the county.

It establishes that Middlesex County objected at the time, in front of a legislative committee, and had already litigated and lost.

It establishes that the county’s own health director attributed the site’s day-to-day problems to that volume rather than to the operator.

It does not establish that the facility handled the surge well. Crabiel told the committee flatly that “Edgeboro could not handle, in an environmentally safe manner, this additional waste,” and the 1987 evaluation documented real operating problems at the site — inadequate cover, litter, odours reaching nearby homes, leachate seeps on the north and east slopes. Those are in the record too, and Part 4 returns to them.

And it does not settle who was right in 1985. The DEP does not speak in the pages I have quoted; this was a hearing convened to hear from the counties on the receiving end. What the hearing establishes is not a verdict. It is that the growth of the Edgeboro mound was a matter of public argument between levels of government at the time it was happening, and that East Brunswick was on the receiving end of a decision it did not make.

By 1987 the county was left with a straightforward and very expensive problem: the landfill was nearly full, and it needed to decide what came next.

NEXT: PART 3 — The Landfill That Actually Did Close

Here is the part almost everything written about Edgeboro gets wrong, including what I assumed going in.

The original Edgeboro landfill had a legal end date. It was written into a state permit in January 1984, it named a specific day, and the facility met it.

What happened next is why there is still a working landfill on Edgeboro Road.

Part 3 explains how one landfill closed on schedule and a second one was built on top of it — and what that actually means.

THE SERIES

• PART 1 — What Is That Mountain on Edgeboro Road? — Read part 1
• PART 2 — How Edgeboro Got So Big — Current installment
• PART 3 — The Landfill That Actually Did Close — Coming soon
• PART 4 — The Fights, the Money and What Happens When the Mountain Stops Growing — Coming soon

Eyes on EB builds its reporting from original records. This installment draws on the transcript of the August 23, 1985 public hearing before the New Jersey Assembly Agriculture and Environment Committee on solid waste management and interdistrict waste flow orders; the 1987 Edgeboro Landfill Evaluation prepared for Middlesex County and the MCUA, including its appendices; and A Report of the Task Group on Global Landfill and the Sommers Brothers Property Sites, New Jersey State Department of Health, August 1988. Where our sources disagree, or where a figure is an estimate rather than a measurement, we have said so.

Thousands of us drive past it every day. It started as a hole in the ground in 1954, it is actually two landfills stacked on top of each other, and the public has even been invited to tour it by bus.

Part 1 of a four-part Eyes on EB series.

Come up Edgeboro Road toward the river and you’ll see it long before you get there.

There’s a hill out in that direction. A big one — green, graded, oddly smooth-sided — sitting in a part of town that is otherwise as flat as a parking lot. River lowlands, marsh grass, warehouses, truck terminals. And then this.

Most of us pass it without a second thought. We know the one-sentence answer: it’s the landfill. And then we keep driving.

But that one-sentence answer turns out to be almost comically incomplete. What’s out there isn’t a hill, and it isn’t really a landfill either. It’s an engineered structure, built up in measured layers across seven decades, sitting on top of an older landfill that closed a long time ago. It’s wrapped in monitoring equipment, wired with hundreds of gas wells, and piped under the Raritan River. And it began, of all things, as a hole in the ground.

So what exactly are we looking at?

I found out mostly by accident.

Years ago I signed up for one of the public open houses at the landfill on Edgeboro Road. You get on a bus, they drive you through the facility, somebody talks the whole way.

I want to be honest about my expectations. I figured I’d be polite for forty minutes and then go get lunch.

Instead I found the whole thing genuinely fascinating, and remarkably thorough. But the part that stuck with me wasn’t the machinery or the scale of the place. It was the people who work there.

They were extraordinarily professional. And my clear personal impression — and I want to be careful to call it that, because it’s an impression and not a measurement — was that these were people who actually cared about protecting the environment. Not in a corporate-brochure way. In a “let me explain to you why this matters” way.

They talked about why proper waste handling matters. Why different materials belong in different places. That inappropriate material does sometimes show up at the gate, occasionally concealed on purpose, and that there’s a whole process for catching it. They seemed a little bit annoyed about that last part, which I found reassuring.

That was one afternoon, one person’s impression, a while ago now. It is not evidence about how the facility operates. But it is the reason I eventually went looking for the documents — and the documents turned out to be far more interesting than I expected.

What this series is, and what this part isn’t

This is Part 1 of a four-part Eyes on EB series about the Edgeboro Road landfill.

There is too much here for one article. Genuinely. We spent a long time in state permits, engineering reports, legislative hearing transcripts, county budgets and municipal bond documents, and the story kept getting bigger.

So here’s the plan. This installment answers the simplest question: what exactly is that thing? What are you looking at when you come up Edgeboro Road and there’s a landscape feature where a landscape feature has no business being?

Part 2 will explain how it got so big — and the answer is not the one I assumed. Part 3 covers the part of the story that surprised me most: one Edgeboro landfill genuinely did close, on a legal deadline, and a second one was built on top of it. Part 4 brings it to the present — the disputes, the money, and the question of what happens when the mountain stops growing.

This part is deliberately not trying to tell the whole history. It’s trying to make the rest of it make sense.

It started as a hole

Here’s the detail I like best, and it’s the one that reframes everything.

Before there was a mountain, there was a pit.

A 1987 engineering evaluation prepared for Middlesex County and the Middlesex County Utilities Authority puts it plainly: “Prior to 1954, a sand and gravel quarry owned by the Herbert Sand Company had been operating on a portion of this site.” The same report records that “The Edgeboro landfill has been operating as a sanitary landfill since 1954.”

So the mound began as somebody digging material out of the ground. Then, starting in 1954, material started going back in.

For its first quarter-century, it was a private operation. On January 12, 1979, Edgeboro Disposal, Inc. received a Certificate of Approval from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection to operate as a sanitary landfill.

What happened after that is Part 2’s story.

What you’re actually looking at

The active facility is the Middlesex County Landfill, at 53 Edgeboro Road, owned and operated by the Middlesex County Utilities Authority — the MCUA, the same authority that runs the regional wastewater treatment plant in Sayreville.

Some numbers, using only figures our sources actually support:

The site is 315 acres. That number is remarkably stable — the 1987 evaluation gives the site as 315 acres, and MCUA gave the same total in a 2024 public information session. What’s changed is how much of it is under waste. In 1987 the breakdown was 233 acres of designated fill area, 57 acres of leachate treatment ponds and 25 acres of scales and receiving area. In 2024 MCUA described 247 acres of landfill contained within those 315 acres, with the remainder serving as environmental buffer.

Height is where people get tripped up, including us, so let’s be precise about two different things at once.

The permitted ceiling has been raised four times over the site’s life — but not all four belong to the same landfill. The older, private landfill was permitted to 87 feet, later revised to roughly 110 feet. The current county landfill was permitted to 165 feet in 2000, and to its present 220 feet in 2016.

And every one of those figures is above mean sea level — not height above the ground you’re standing on. The site sits in the Raritan and South River lowlands, so the two measures are closer here than they’d be elsewhere, but they are not the same thing, and no source we found gives a height above grade. Anyone who tells you the mound is “220 feet tall” is doing arithmetic the record doesn’t support.

By MCUA’s own account it takes in about 500,000 tons of waste a year, serving all 25 Middlesex County municipalities and over 800,000 residents, six days a week. In January 2026 the authority reported an average of 252 trucks and 1,714 tons a day.

Two landfills, not one

This is the thing that most changes how you see the site, and it’s worth slowing down for.

What looks like one mound is really two landfills from two different eras, stacked.

Underneath is the older, privately owned landfill — the one that operated from 1954. It is closed and capped. On top of and beside it is the active MCUA landfill, which opened on February 5, 1992, after six months of construction.

The federal government has a term for this arrangement. In a 2010 news release, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency described “this piggyback landfill design, in which MCUA landfill space is constructed on top of the capped Edgeboro landfill.”

Locally, people had already coined their own word for it. At a New Jersey Senate Environment Committee hearing held in South River in May 1993, a legislator testified that “Edgeboro Landfill has the distinction of being the nation’s only double-decker landfill.” We should flag that fairly: that was a legislator’s assertion in testimony, not a verified fact, and we haven’t been able to confirm the “nation’s only” part. But “double-decker” is what people around here were calling it thirty-three years ago, and it’s a good description of what’s physically there.

One warning that will save you confusion for the rest of the series: the name doesn’t tell you which landfill anyone means. In state regulation and in MCUA’s own municipal disposal contracts, the active county facility is also called “the Edgeboro Landfill.” When you see the name in a document, check the date and the described owner.

How and why the old one closed and the new one opened is Part 3. It is a better story than “they said it would close and it didn’t,” which is the version I half-expected to find and which turns out not to be what happened.

How you actually build a landfill

Modern landfills are not holes you throw things into. They’re engineered containers, built in stages, and the specifications are written into the state permit.

Working from the Solid Waste Facility Permit issued by NJDEP for the county landfill, here’s roughly what’s under the waste, from the bottom up:

• three feet of compacted clay, or an approved soil-bentonite equivalent
• a 60-mil high-density polyethylene secondary liner
• 18 inches of sand containing perforated pipes — this is the leak detection layer, whose entire job is to catch anything that gets through the liner above it
• an 80-mil HDPE primary liner
• 18 inches of sand containing larger perforated pipes — the leachate collection layer

Leachate is simply the liquid that percolates through a landfill. The permit requires that the liquid sitting on the liner never exceed one foot deep, which is why the collection layer matters. At Edgeboro, collected leachate is pumped from three drainage areas into the MCUA trunk sewer and treated at the wastewater plant in Sayreville. It doesn’t go into a stream. It goes into the sewer system, like everything else.

The landfill opened in 1992 with three of these lined cells. By 2010 there were nine.

The daily rhythm

The permit gets specific about how filling actually happens, and reading it explains a lot about what you see from the road.

There can be no more than two working faces at a time — the exposed area where trucks are actually tipping. Each face is limited to 150 feet wide, or 15,000 square feet of exposed area. Waste gets compacted in two-foot layers. A day’s lift, including cover, can’t exceed 12 feet. The slope of the working face can’t be steeper than three feet horizontal for every one foot vertical.

Then there’s cover, which is the part I’d never thought about:

• Six inches of material over all exposed waste by the end of every working day
• Twelve inches on anything that will sit exposed longer than 24 hours

That’s why the mound looks like a graded earthwork rather than a dump. It’s covered at the end of every working day. Christine Sullivan, an environmental advocate who took the public tour in 2023 and wrote about it, put it simply: “The landfill is capped nightly.”

When an area is finished for good, it gets a final cap — six layers, including a textured 60-mil HDPE geomembrane, a sand drainage layer, filter fabric, and a foot of vegetative soil on top. That’s what turns a working face into the green slope you see from Route 18.

What gets checked at the gate

This is the part the employees told me about on that bus, and it’s also the part I was most able to verify afterward — which is exactly why I’m separating the two.

The state permit requires the operator to maintain a program for detecting and preventing disposal of hazardous and other unauthorized waste. Its specific requirements include:

• “random inspection of incoming loads”, with inspections recorded
• “training of facility personnel to recognize regulated hazardous waste”
• any truck suspected of hauling hazardous waste is “stopped and inspected”
• “continuous visual monitoring of the discharged waste” — someone is watching what comes out of the truck
• suspect material may not be returned to whoever sent it; it must be segregated, stored securely, and NJDEP notified immediately through its Environmental Action Line
• and the operator must record the name of the hauler suspected of delivering it

MCUA’s own public fact sheet adds that inspectors check for proper waste classification, out-of-county waste, recyclables and banned materials, and that certain industrial waste requires laboratory analysis and pre-approval before it can be brought in at all.

The permit’s list of what’s prohibited is its own kind of education: sewage sludge, bulk liquids and semi-liquids, septic tank clean-out waste, untreated regulated medical waste, hazardous waste, leaves, and anything designated as recyclable under the county recycling plan.

One clarification there, because it matters later in this series: that prohibition is on sewage sludge being buried as waste. Separately, and controversially, a sludge-derived product was for years used as cover material at Edgeboro under a state consent order — which is a different thing entirely, and which became the subject of a serious public fight. That’s Part 4.

None of that proves my impression of the people. It does confirm that the procedures they described to me are real, required, and written down — and that catching concealed material is part of the job, not a story told to visitors.

For what it’s worth, I’m not the only one who came away from that tour impressed. Sullivan, writing in June 2023 as co-chair of a group called Getting Past Plastics — an outside environmental advocate, unconnected to me and not employed by MCUA — described “the landfill’s staff of 30 (many with advanced degrees)” working six days a week, and called it “a highly professional tour.” Hers is an advocate’s opinion column rather than a piece of reporting, and its enthusiasm is her own. But she’s independent, she went, and she reached a similar conclusion.

Gas, wells and a pipeline under the river

Decomposing waste produces methane. A landfill this size produces a lot of it, and the gas has to be captured for safety, odour control and environmental protection.

By MCUA’s account there are roughly 350 gas wells in the mound, connected by piping, feeding a collection system. The gas travels about seven miles by pipeline — running under the Raritan River — to a cogeneration facility in Sayreville, where it generates up to 17 megawatts of electricity that powers the authority’s wastewater treatment plant. Some of the methane is also processed and sold as renewable biomethane.

Notably, the system collects gas from the active landfill and from a closed one. The old landfill underneath is still producing, and still connected.

Beyond the gas system, the permit requires an extensive monitoring regime:

• quarterly methane surveys around the perimeter, checking for off-site gas migration
• quarterly leachate sampling
• quarterly inclinometer readings — instruments that measure whether the mound is moving
• an annual topographic survey of the whole landfill
• a minimum 150-foot setback and a 50-foot buffer zone from the toe of the slope, with that buffer dedicated as open space

MCUA reports 44 groundwater monitoring wells across the site.

Why the groundwater gets watched so closely

The geology under the mound explains a lot.

The 1987 evaluation describes the layers: decades of fill, then organic tidal marsh — silt, clay and peat — originally up to 35 feet thick and since “consolidated to a thickness of four to five feet by the weight of the overlying landfill.” The mound is slowly squeezing the marsh beneath it. Below that sits the Farrington Sand, part of an aquifer the report notes “is used extensively in Middlesex County as a source of groundwater.”

Then the twist. Public water-supply pumping in the region, which the report traces back to 1877, gradually reversed the natural direction of groundwater flow. Water that once drained toward the Raritan and South Rivers now moves inland — so the groundwater, in the engineers’ words, “appears to now transport any contamination towards” the well field doing the pumping. Whatever happens on this site doesn’t simply wash out to the river.

The same report found elevated readings in wells downgradient of the landfill. It listed six possible causes — among them the landfill, older waste outside the containment wall, an adjacent sanitary sewer, and the rivers themselves — and concluded that “The level of information available is insufficient to determine the exact source(s).”

It’s worth being precise about what those readings measured: organic loading, not toxic chemicals. A separate NJDEP memorandum from 1986, testing for priority pollutants, reported “no significant pollution in any of the well water tested.” Both results are in the record. Neither settles the question.

What came after the 1980s — including the odour disputes longtime residents remember vividly — is Part 4.

Birds, deer, and an open house

Here’s something I didn’t expect.

The landfill has a documented wildlife population. Sullivan’s 2023 account reports that the East Brunswick Environmental Commission identified 19 different bird species on the site, including falcons and ospreys nesting there, along with deer.

And that isn’t accidental. The state permit requires implementation of a Wildlife Mitigation and Landscaping Plan, prepared by the engineering firm Malcolm Pirnie in November 1989, to be carried out as sections of the landfill are closed and capped. The habitat is a permit condition with a design behind it, drafted before most of the current mound existed.

There’s one more thing on the property that surprises people: East Brunswick’s own recycling and composting operation is on the Edgeboro Road campus. The township runs a Class B and C recycling center there, redesignated by NJDEP in 2021. Some of what you put at the curb doesn’t just go past the landfill. It stops on the same site.

And some of this has been shown to the public firsthand. The tour I took wasn’t a one-off. MCUA has run public open houses periodically and has offered tours to school groups. For a Saturday morning in June 2026, the authority advertised a tour running about 40 minutes, billed as “an inside look at how the Middlesex County Landfill safely manages nearly 4 million pounds of waste every day,” with a new requirement that guests be age 7 or older.

That’s the authority’s own promotional material, so take the framing as theirs. But the tour is real, and worth taking if the chance comes around again. Forty minutes, and you’ll never drive past that mound the same way again.

What East Brunswick gets

One last number, because it’s the hinge into everything that follows.

East Brunswick is paid to host this. In its adopted 2026 budget, MCUA lists $4,537,000 in host community benefits to the Township of East Brunswick — money the town has been receiving in some form since 1985 under a 1985 state law providing host community benefits to municipalities where a solid waste facility is sited.

It’s a little more complicated than one line item, and the township books it in more than one place, which we’ll untangle in Part 4. But the round number people use — about $4.5 million a year — is close enough to be going on with.

Which raises a question worth holding onto: how did one township end up hosting the disposal site for all 25 municipalities in Middlesex County?

NEXT: PART 2 — How Edgeboro Got So Big

Here’s what I assumed before we started: that at some point East Brunswick, or a company operating here, made a decision to build a very large regional landfill.

That is not what the record shows.

In 1976 Edgeboro took in a few hundred thousand tons of waste a year. Ten years later it was taking millions. Somewhere in between, other landfills in Middlesex County stopped operating — one of them very suddenly — and enormous volumes of waste began arriving on Edgeboro Road, from places well beyond East Brunswick and, in a meaningful share, from beyond New Jersey entirely.

Middlesex County went to court to stop it.

Part 2 is the story of how that happened, who decided it, and why the mountain grew upward.

THE SERIES

• PART 1 — What Is That Mountain on Edgeboro Road? — Current installment
• PART 2 — How Edgeboro Got So Big — Coming soon
• PART 3 — The Landfill That Actually Did Close — Coming soon
• PART 4 — The Fights, the Money and What Happens When the Mountain Stops Growing — Coming soon

Eyes on EB builds its reporting from original records. This installment draws on the 1987 Edgeboro Landfill Evaluation prepared for Middlesex County and the MCUA; the NJDEP Solid Waste Facility Permit for the Middlesex County Landfill; NJDEP permit filings and public notices; MCUA budgets, public information materials and monthly reports; a 2010 U.S. EPA news release; the transcript of a 1993 New Jersey Senate Environment Committee hearing; and a 2023 first-person account of the public tour. Where our sources disagree, we’ve said so.