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:
“In April 1984, a slope failure measuring 300’ x 75’ x 50’ occurred on the southeast face of the landfill. The collapse resulted in a break in a retaining dike and displacement of the adjacent wetlands. As a result, a Court Order was issued on April 17, 1984, requiring that Global cease accepting waste.”
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.
“In both instances, DEP waited until both facilities were closed, declared an emergency, which was brought about by their own inaction, and redirected the flow of this waste into Edgeboro, the only remaining landfill facility in Middlesex County.”
— Freeholder David B. Crabiel, August 23, 1985
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:
“Middlesex County sought relief from both the DEP and the courts, to prevent this out-of-county waste from coming into Edgeboro. Despite our best efforts, the waste continues to flow, resulting in a 6000 to 7000 ton-per-day waste flow into Edgeboro which, until last year, was accommodating only 1800 tons. It was obvious to all parties that Edgeboro could not handle, in an environmentally safe manner, this additional waste. It caused unsafe conditions in East Brunswick and the surrounding communities, resulting in increased traffic, air pollution, noise pollution, and noxious odors.”
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.
“In 1984, just a year or so ago, an estimated 300 to 400 trucks per day utilized the Edgeboro facility. As a consequence of DEP-BPU redirect orders, approximately 1200, and probably closer to 1400 trucks per day may be seen lined up along Edgeboro Road and Route 18.”
— Assemblyman Frank M. Pelly, August 23, 1985
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:
“Please be advised that Edgeboro Landfill is probably the most environmentally sound landfill in the State of New Jersey. The Landfill is now contained, cut-off wall installed, leachate and gas collection system is also installed, and I suspect that if the level of operation was that of a year ago, we would all be pleased with the facility.”
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:
“The problem associated with the day to day operation of the Landfill is due to the greatly increased number of vehicles that have been directed to use the Landfill.”
“We have reached a conclusion that it is almost impossible to run a nuisance free operation under existing conditions. The D.E.P. has authorized the landfill to operate an enlarged dumping face, and the amount of traffic still gives the appearance of organized pandemonium at the site.”
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:
“A year and one-half ago, if we had not been mandated to take out-of-county waste, the existing permits at Edgeboro Landfill would have covered us for 10 years. If additional permits for vertical and horizontal had been considered and granted for Middlesex County — and I am not making a judgement on what it should be — that landfill could have gone on for 31 years.”
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:
“the relatively inexpensive landfill tipping fees now paid by Middlesex County taxpayers for solid waste disposal will be quadrupled as the county will necessarily have to construct higher cost resource recovery disposal facilities much earlier than anticipated to replace the soon-to-be-exhausted disposal capacity at that site, capacity which has been, by-and-large, depleted by out-of-county users. I repeat that: Our fees will be quadrupled by the closure of Edgeboro Landfill which will occur much sooner than initially anticipated.”
His conclusion assigned responsibility squarely:
“the failure of the DEP to require each county to provide for its own solid waste disposal needs, as is required by the Solid Waste Management Act, has had a whole host of negative impacts on the residents and taxpayers of East Brunswick and Middlesex County.”
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.
