The Landfill That Actually Did Close

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.