The way society thinks about waste has changed dramatically.

Highly-engineered landfills have replaced the old municipal dumps. Recycling has gone mainstream, and schools, environmental groups, and governments promote it along with reuse and waste reduction.

But landfills are king, and there are two in Monroe County: High Acres in Perinton and Mill Seat in Riga, both operated by Waste Management Inc. (Monroe County owns Mill Seat but contracts with Waste Management for its operation.)

High Acres, the state's second-largest landfill, currently occupies about 218 acres. Thirty-three percent of its waste comes from Monroe County, with almost all the rest coming from other parts of the state. (Almost nothing comes from New York City.) Mill Seat is smaller: 98-acres on a 385-acre site in a rural area of the town. Ninety percent of its waste comes from Monroe County.

Each landfill has been a source of controversy over the years, but the current focus is High Acres. Waste Management wants to expand it by 144 acres, giving it a total footprint of 362 acres. The Department of Environmental Conservation and the Towns of Perinton and Macedon, where the expansion will be located, still have to sign off.

As Waste Management works to get permits to expand High Acres, which it has owned since the 1970's, many people are asking how much more landfill space is really needed here.

If the High Acres expansion is approved, there would be more room to put waste, and that would expand High Acres' future life expectancy to 40 years from the current 11. (The amount of waste the landfill would take in per day would not change from the current 3,500 ton limit.)

Waste Management began seeking approval for the expansion - a process that can take upwards of five years -two years ago, says district manager Jeff Richardson.

High Acres is located behind an industrial park on Perinton Parkway. Homes border one side of the landfill, and farm fields and Route 31 run alongside another. Residents have cited a variety of concerns about the expansion, including the effect on property values, environmental impacts, and truck traffic.

Under the current permit, Waste Management can still build the mound up another 20 feet. And initially, the company wanted an additional 100-foot vertical expansion. Residents were concerned about odor and noise, and they argued that the landfill would rise above treetops and become too visible, marring the landscape.

But beyond the visual impact, piling garbage on top of garbage increases the likelihood of a liner failure, says Laurie Collins, who lives near High Acres and is a member of Preserve Scenic Perinton Alliance. In turn, that could cause contaminants to leach out, she says.

Waste Management has since withdrawn the height increase from its application with the Town of Perinton, but the application for the horizontal and vertical expansions remains before the DEC. The company could go back to the town with the vertical expansion proposal at a later date, if the DEC approves that part of the permit.

While the DEC hasn't yet approved the permits for the High Acres expansion, it has accepted the project's environmental and technical reviews. Preserve Scenic Perinton Alliance filed a lawsuit challenging the DEC's environmental review. Among the claims: that the review doesn't include an adequate traffic study or a proper visual analysis. If successful, the lawsuit could prevent the expansion.

Communities with landfills do receive some benefits. Through an agreement with Waste Management, Perinton and Macedon receive payments for each ton of waste the facility takes. That money helped finance Perinton's community center. Perinton residents also get free curbside recycling and can take their garbage to the landfill and dispose of it for $5 a carload.

Riga gets similar, though more extensive, benefits. Through its agreement with the county, for instance, Riga has a citizens advisory board and a program to repay homeowners for the loss in property value. Perinton residents say they want something similar.

Even with the benefits, however, a landfill's impact outweighs everything Waste Management has done to try to "quote-unquote, be a good neighbor," insists Laurie Collins.

Problems or not, people need somewhere to dispose of their waste, and disposal companies sell them a place. Though highly regulated, landfills operate by and large on market forces. Since the field is dominated by private companies, fees are based on how much trash is generated and how much space is available.

And for landfills like Mill Seat and High Acres, the market is helped by changes in our practice of waste storage. Municipalities should be finding environmentally sound ways to deal with their own waste, Knauf says. But more often they send it to communities that already have landfills. The expansion of High Acres is not driven by local waste, he says. It's driven by the needs of other areas.

And indeed, waste-disposal sites have become more regional. Twenty-five years ago, says Richardson, there were about 2,000 dumps in New York State - small municipal lots where trash was literally piled into holes or swamps and covered with dirt. Now there are 26 landfills in New York, mostly larger, technically designed facilities.

The state discourages the opening of new landfills, instead emphasizing long-term planning, Richardson says.

The bottom line is, until people stop producing garbage, there will be a demand for landfills and for landfills to grow.

The average person produces about 4.5 pounds of garbage a day, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That number has held steady for about 15 years. But that's an increase from the mid 20th century. In 1980, the average person produced 3.7 pounds of garbage a day; in 1960, 2.7 pounds.

Environmentalists argue that systemic change needs to occur. Lawmakers need to expand recycling and reuse programs, they say. New York's proposed bottle bill, which would require deposits on a wider range of beverage containers, is an example of good policy, says Steve Breyman, executive director of the Citizens Environmental Coalition. The Assembly passed the bill, but it remains in committee in the Senate.

Government needs to stress recycling and reuse, says Breyman, not landfills. And private industry should try to reduce packaging. There needs to be a shift from a disposable society to one that values the three R's - reduce, reuse, recycle - says Breyman.

The good news is that nationally, in 2005, 32.1 percent of our garbage was recycled, up from 16.2 percent in 1990.

And for the waste that can't be recycled, there are options other than burying it. Knauf and his law partner Linda Shaw point to waste-to-energy plants - which burn garbage at very high temperatures to generate electricity -and they wonder why one wasn't considered for High Acres. (Richardson says the plants, like landfills, are highly regulated and are criticized for emitting harmful gases.)

Some of the newer plants in Europe, however, nearly vaporize waste. The gases are collected for reuse, and the ash, which takes up less space than the original product, is placed in a landfill. European countries are putting barely any garbage in the ground, Knauf and Shaw say.

And the technology for things like waste-to-energy is changing rapidly. That leads Knauf and Shaw to wonder why Waste Management is planning for an expansion so far in advance. It will be another decade before the company would use the new parts of the landfill. By that time, says Knauf, technology may have found a better way to deal with waste than burying it.

"We've come a long way in just the last 15 years on how to handle this problem, which we haven't really embraced in the United States," says Shaw, "but other countries are doing it very successfully."

The High Acres application remains under review. Perinton's Conservation Board has collected public comment and is nearing the end of its scrutiny, at which point it will issue an advisory letter, says Supervisor Jim Smith. The town has also hired the engineering firm Clough Harbour to review the proposal.

Smith says he expects that the town will make a decision on the project within the next "couple of months."

A landfill primer

Before the 1970's, landfills were often little more than a hole in the ground where garbage was dumped and buried.

Since then, they have developed into highly engineered facilities, designed as a system of cells and barriers meant to keep the waste in and the elements out.

Landfills must be approved by the state Department of Environmental Conservation, a process that can take five to 10 years. The DEC also monitors the landfills once they are up and running. If any environmental regulations are violated, the DEC levies fines.

Landfills still begin as a hole in the ground. But from there, a multi-tiered liner system is installed. Layers of soil, high-density polyethylene (a plastic), and clay are laid on top of each other. Pipes are installed in the layers to collect leachate - the water that passes through the waste and collects at the bottom of the landfill - and transport it to holding tanks. It is treated at a wastewater treatment plant, and the solids are returned to the landfill or taken to another landfill.

Once a landfill section is full, it is capped with clay, plastic, or a combination of the two, and is topped with a layer of soil and grass.

Waste such as food can decompose in a matter of months - a process that thrives in the anaerobic environment - while things like construction debris takes many years, says Jeff Richardson, district manager of Waste Management, which operates both landfills in Monroe County.

Many landfill critics and the federal Environmental Protection Agency say that landfills and liners, no matter how carefully built, will eventually crack or allow leakage. And landfills, even non-hazardous waste facilities, can be home to some pretty dangerous chemicals - known carcinogens such as benzene and trichloroethane (TCE).

For that reason, landfills are often designed so that contaminants can be collected.

The bulk of what goes into Monroe County's two landfills is what's called municipal solid waste. Basically, that's the non-recyclables that the average person puts out at the curb on trash day: product packaging, food waste, clothing, yard waste, furniture.

Monroe's landfills also accept, with limitations, "beneficial use determination" materials like construction debris.

At the Mill Seat and High Acres landfills, Waste Management keeps track of what haulers are taking there. Only customers with accounts with Waste Management are allowed in. Drivers' names and truck numbers are recorded, as are the materials on board. Pictures are taken of the front of the truck, and the material is weighed to ensure that permitted limits aren't exceeded. Crews that spread and cover the waste are trained to look for materials that don't belong in the landfill.

Throughout the life of a landfill, the operator is supposed to set aside money to care for the property after it is closed down. Some landfills dormant as hills; others are reinvented as parks, dirt tracks for bicycles races, and driving ranges. The operators work out a post-closure plan with the surrounding communities.

Still, reuse has its challenges.

"You definitely can reuse landfills if it's approached correctly," says environmental attorney Alan Knauf. "But not a 260-foot landfill. If you've got a lower area that's been refilled, there are ways to use it."

Wal-Mart goes green

An unlikely leader is emerging in the effort to reduce waste from consumer products.

Next year, retail mega-chain Wal-Mart will start measuring suppliers on their ability to develop environmentally sound packaging.

"They're going to do business with those that are most environmentally friendly," says Tom Voss, who chairs the packaging sciences program at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Grassroots consumer groups have long called for environmentally friendly product packaging, says Voss. But Wal-Mart's marketplace clout will amplify those calls, says Voss, because when Wal-Mart speaks, manufacturers listen if they want to keep their products on Wal-Mart's shelves.

Corporate interest in ecologically sustainable packaging is nothing new. It has been cyclical over the last few decades, however, says Voss. There was an upswing in the prosperous 1990's, but it declined during the leaner times at the turn of the century.

It's a movement that packaging professionals have been waiting for. For years, the industry has convened task forces on sustainable and environmentally friendly design. Professionals have worked to teach each other what they know. But packaging designers were at the mercy of corporate America, which often favors less expensive designs.

Of course, there's a practical purpose behind Wal-Mart's efforts. As the company points out on its website, less packaging means products take up less room. That means more can be shipped in, say, one truck trailer. That's an efficiency, and that means more money in the company's pocket.

Cynics will likely say it's all about the money. But even if it is, it's still an effort to reduce waste. Besides, many environmentalists are trying to prove to industry that it pays to go green. In this area, Wal-Mart seems to be setting an ethical example. Wal-Mart has touted its initiative as not just a cost-saving move, but also an effort to cut down the amount of trash society creates.

"This is something they can dress themselves up in white with," says Voss.

Tapping the power

When is a landfill not just a landfill? When it's a power plant, too.

Landfill operators across the country have opened plants to convert landfill gas to electricity. Monroe County and Waste Management recently opened one at the Mill Seat landfill in Riga, and Waste Management is expanding its plant at the High Acres landfill in Perinton.

The plants operate on combustible gas generated by the decomposing organic waste. Landfill gas is not the same as natural gas or pure methane. It's a mixture of gases, including carbon dioxide, nitrogen, oxygen, and non-methane organic compounds. The methane is typically the most useful gas, but at some landfills the carbon dioxide is collected and used or sold for production of dry ice.

The Mill Seat plant is capable of producing 4.8 megawatts of electricity a day. It uses gases generated not just from the landfill but also from the sludge at two of the county's water-treatment plants, says John Graham, the county's environmental services commissioner. (That move allowed the county to decommission the Van Lear plant's incinerators and stop burning the sludge.)

At the High Acres plant, capacity is 3.2 megawatts per day. But Waste Management officials hope to soon complete an expansion that will increase production to 9.6 megawatts - enough juice to power 9,000 to 12,000 homes.

Landfill operators see the plants as a profitable and environmentally safe way to vent and get rid of the gas. Municipal officials often, but not always, see it as a source of cheap, renewable energy.

For others, opinions are mixed.

The methane generated by landfills contributes significantly to global warming, says Hugh Mitchell, a former state Sierra Club official and a member of the Rochester regional club. The Sierra Club does encourage landfill operators to reharness methane.

"It's sort of a Band-Aid thing," - better than letting the methane into the air - says environmental attorney Alan Knauf.

There are also waste-to-energy plants, which Knauf and his law partner Linda Shaw say should be considered for High Acres. The two are representing a group of Perinton residents who oppose a proposed landfill expansion at High Acres.

Waste-to-energy plants operate by burning garbage at a very high temperature. The heat generated by that process is used to create electricity.

But the plants aren't without their critics. The problem, say environmental groups and even waste companies, is that they still generate emissions and ash that must be landfilled. And they have even more environmental and safety regulations than landfills, says Jeff Richardson, district manager for Waste Management.

Others say the energy projects have bigger problems: they rely on and encourage landfills. For that reason, the practices should not be considered green or renewable energy, environmental groups say.

Company history

Nationwide, Waste Management owns or operates 283 landfills. It's also the nation's largest recycling company. It has a toxic-waste landfill arm, Chemical Waste Management, which operates a site in the town of Porter, in Niagara County. And it has a waste-to-energy arm, Wheelabrator.

Up through the 1990's, the company had a string of environmental violations. In recent years, the problems seem to have tapered off, though in 2003 the company was hit with a $239,000 fine in Texas. In April, there was a fire at its Waimanalo Gulch landfill near Honolulu. (Landfills generate combustible gas, and fires and explosions can be a problem.) There is also a bribery investigation at that landfill, which is owned by the City of Honolulu but operated by Waste Management.

Local Waste Management officials insist that the problems that once plagued the national company are a thing of the past. Like many other industries, waste-disposal companies have been through a number of mergers and acquisitions. Waste Management picked up some "not-so-good facilities" during that process, says Jeff Richardson, district manager, as well as some "people that compromised themselves."

The courts appear to believe that Waste Management is qualified to operate landfills. The company is continually cleared in hearings meant to determine its qualifications. And in those hearings, the judges look at the company as a whole, not just its regional operations.