Landfills Feed on Poverty.  
By Frank Warren, President of Greene Citizens for Responsible Growth, April 21, 2006.

Landfills feed on poverty – it is essential for their development.  They are drawn to areas of job loss and low income – as are all environmentally disastrous businesses or endeavors. 

In the late 1990’s Greene County residents formed an organization called Greene Citizens for Responsible Growth (GCRG) to prevent a Regional Municipal Solid Waste Landfill from coming to the county.  GCRG organized across lines of race and class in an effort to stop the dump and protect the environment.  There were farmers and retired people, school teachers and day laborers, housewives and war veterans.  Monthly meetings were held in an African American church.

GCRG stood up against the powerful garbage industry which intended to place this monster not far from Greene Central High School and Greene County Middle School, the only high and middle schools in the county.  The site was located on a major traffic artery running beside them both.  Traffic generated by the proposed landfill was estimated at 200 18-wheel garbage trucks per day, 365 days a year.

In a broad sense, the kind of poverty which attracts environmental disasters such as garbage dumps, prisons, chip mills and big-box stores is not just the poverty of ill-clad children, decrepit housing, single parents working to care for their offspring; but poverty of thought, poverty of education, and that poverty of perception which drives people to accumulate things they do not need, often with money they do not have.

Landfills are an affliction upon those living in poverty.  They are also dependant upon them.  The more people buy things to use only once and throw away, the more money garbage tycoons make. Styrofoam cups, plastic buckets of all types and sizes, plastic bags, cardboard containers, paper and plastic wrappers, fast-food trash, junk mail, etc. feed garbage dumps. Not to mention “construction and demolition” (C&D) waste – often consisting of useable building material.

Scores of throw-away replacements for tableware, cups and saucers, drink containers, towels and dish-cloths, have been created to serve the interests of the fast-food industry.  People working long hours often eat on the run, wolfing down food filled with fat, corn, salt and sugar but low in nutrition and more expensive – most certainly in the long run - than fruit and vegetables.

Greene County is one of the poorest counties in the state.  Waste Management, billionaire garbage industry from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, smelled a push-over.  GCRG brought a lawsuit to stop the landfill.  With three out of five County Commissioners voting in support, Waste Management hired the most powerful law firm in the Southeast, Womble and Carlyle of Winston-Salem, and thought they had a “done deal.”  An extended legal battle ensued, during which GCRG brought over a hundred citizens by bus and private car to a Court of Appeals hearing in Raleigh. The Court of Appeals ruled in our favor.  The county and Waste Management appealed to the State Supreme Court, but the appeal was rejected.  Waste Management lost the case.

The environmental struggle was far from over, however.  Before GCRG knew what was happening the same three Commissioners that had supported the landfill, at the urging of officials in Raleigh, including some who had received contributions from the prison industry, “helped us” by locating a 1,000-bed maximum-security prison in a wetlands area.  The county already had two large prisons.  The third one, also, came in the name of economic development. 

Perhaps this is an example of another kind of poverty: the poverty of individual integrity.  What do you think?

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