Landfill

The Winslow Township Sanitary Landfill will close on Dec. 31 if the state Department of Environmental Protection approves that date. The Township Committee authorized the proposed closing date in a letter mailed yesterday to the DEP. Citing a 60 percent reduction in the waste flow since July 1, and a 20 percent reduction of overall waste during the "colder months," the letter said, the landfill should be kept open for the next four months....

Four years after residential wells near the Second Avenue landfill were found to have dangerously high levels of PCE, hydrologists at the state Department of Environmental Resources have concluded that the borough-owned landfill is not the main source of contamination, after all. Phoenixville officials said from the beginning that the now-defunct landfill was not the source of the PCE - short for perchloroethylene or tetrachloroethylene....

Residents near the Bethayres landfill are wary about a recent decision by the Department of Environmental Resources to deny renewal permits to the owners of the dump. "They'll just appeal it," Emil Dix said of the department's July 10 letter to landfill owners that called for the shutdown of the 35-acre demolition waste landfill if a liner is not installed. Dix and more than 30 of his neighbors have been fighting with Mignatti Bros., owner of the Bethayres Reclamation Center landfill in Lower Moreland Township for the last seven years.

There's a place for everything, and for 60 million cubic yards of things nobody wants, that place is the GEMS landfill in Gloucester Township. Work is under way on a court-ordered, $32.5 million cleanup of the site, but the crews in their white protective suits can't make the garbage disappear. The best the township can hope for, officials say, is that leaking poisons percolating through the 60-acre dump can be contained and treated, and that the rust-colored chemical plume flowing into nearby Briar Lake and Holly Run will go dry. "The leachate is always coming out and will always be coming out until we fix it," said Edward McClusick, the onsite representative of the state Department of Environmental Protection.

The Lower Moreland Township Board of Commissioners has voted, 4-0, to appoint legal counsel and hold a hearing Aug. 23 on the request of two landfill owners that their property be made a mobile-home district. Theophile and Joseph Mignatti are seeking to have their 34.76-acre landfill site rezoned from a single-family residential district to a mobile-home park. Twenty residents attended the meeting Tuesday night. Commissioners Emily- Jane Lemole and Bernard Kanefsky were absent.

The cleanup of the 46-acre landfill on River Road in Croydon will be discussed Thursday at a public meeting at the Croydon Fire House Annex. The Croydon Civic Association initiated the meeting when it asked Rohm & Haas Co., the owner of the landfill, to update the community on cleanup plans, said Theresa Bradley, the civic association's president. The meeting is scheduled to start at 8 p.m. in the annex, which is across the street from the Croydon Fire Company firehouse at State Street and Christy Avenue.

Mayor Gerald Luongo said yesterday that a recently discovered old landfill under a portion of the Colts Neck Estates housing development poses no health risk to nearby residents. Luongo declined to elaborate further on the results of testing by JCA Engineering Associates Inc. of Mount Laurel, which he reviewed on Wednesday. He said a full report on the tests would be released at a public meeting at 7 p.m. Monday at Chestnut Ridge Middle School, 641 Hurffville-Cross Keys Rd. "What is there can be dealt with," Luongo said.

In the ongoing battle to control odor, the Valley Forge Sewer Authority has yielded to local pressure and agreed to ship more sludge to landfills. "The more you have, the more likely it is to produce odors," said Joseph S. Bateman, general manager of the sewage treatment facility in Schuylkill Township. The sewage treatment plant, which serves eight Main Line municipalities, is expected to produce about 11,300 tons of sludge this year, Bateman said. Of that, about 2,100 tons of the claylike residue was scheduled to go to a landfill.

In 1988, in the Decade of the Deal, an artful deal was pulled together by the little borough of Kennett Square and Kennett, the township that surrounds it in southern Chester County. The proposal was to create a $1 million park on a 106-acre expanse on the north end of the borough reaching into the township. But there was - and is - one drawback: The land, between North Walnut and Leslie Streets south of the Route 1 bypass, holds a 23-acre landfill, closed now for 13 years.

With its odors and liquefied decomposed waste so worrisome to neighboring residents, a Lower Moreland landfill provided a setting last weekend for the kind of minor political drama that seems to occur most often around election time. For three years, the Terwood Road landfill, a final resting place for demolition debris, has been the source of neighbors' complaints because of its irritating odors and the fears of possible water contamination that would affect backyard wells. On Saturday, state Sen. Stewart J. Greenleaf (R., Montgomery)

WASHINGTON - The head of the Air Force on Wednesday disputed a report that some unidentified remains from the Sept. 11, 2001, plane crash site near Shanksville, Pa., had been disposed of in a landfill, casting more confusion on an episode that has embarrassed the Pentagon and Dover Air Force Base, which handles the remains of the nation's war dead. A report commissioned by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and released Tuesday found that some unidentifiable remains of victims from the terrorist attack on the Pentagon and the United Airlines Flight 93 crash near Shanksville were "placed in sealed containers that were provided to a biomedical waste disposal contractor.

WASHINGTON - Some cremated remains of people who were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks were disposed of in a landfill, the Pentagon revealed Tuesday, tracing the problems with the handling of remains at Dover Air Force Base back more than a decade. A report by a panel that was tasked with reviewing procedures at Dover described "gross mismanagement" at the mortuary in Delaware where the nation's war dead arrive, including the mishandling of remains from an unknown number of victims of the 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and of hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed near Shanksville, Pa. Remains that could not be identified or tested were cremated, the report said, and "then placed in sealed containers that were provided to a biomedical waste disposal contractor.

NEW YORK - The city will phase out the use of polluting heavy oils to heat buildings and will begin building solar power plants on capped landfills, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Thursday in his first update to a four-year-old environmental plan that aims to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 30 percent by 2030. Under the plan, the phaseout of heavy oils from New York City's boilers would start right away and be completed by 2030. It would reduce the presence of airborne fine particulate matter, which the city says is killing 3,000 residents each year and forcing 6,000 to seek emergency asthma treatment.

The sprawling field, surrounded by a shoulder-high whitewashed fence, looks like a Kentucky horse farm dropped into the middle of South Jersey suburbia. But visitors tempted to pull off their shoes and enjoy the grassy expanse will notice a sign warning them to keep out. Though the former Buzby landfill is considered safe for visitors, a decadelong effort to open it as a 37-acre public park - in an area where open land is a rarity - has repeatedly stumbled. Now some wonder whether time is running out on a project that has been mired in litigation, shrinking grant funds, and the complications of state bureaucracy.

WILMINGTON - Jose Garcia stands atop a 145-foot mountain of trash, his gaze locked on the trucks dumping pile after pile of Delaware's waste just yards from his feet. His trained eye scans the landscape for anything that doesn't belong - chemical drums, slabs of asbestos, red biohazard bags carrying used bandages or syringes. Just two weeks before, one of Garcia's colleagues at Wilmington's Cherry Island Landfill discovered the body of former Pentagon official John P. Wheeler 3d as it tumbled from the back of an arriving truck.

Delaware's bizarre murder mystery involving a top U.S. military expert took more strange twists yesterday with two reported sightings of John Wheeler III in the days before his body was found in a Wilmington landfill. One witness - an attendant at a parking lot next to the New Castle County courthouse in Wilmington who related her tale to police and then to two Philadelphia TV stations - told reporters that she saw Wheeler, 66, acting erratically last Wednesday. She claimed that the man she believes to be the former top Air Force aide was unable to find where he parked his car and looked disheveled - not wearing an overcoat and holding a shoe in one hand.

Police in Delaware have discovered evidence that a former Pentagon aide may have been involved in an attempted arson days before his murder, a law enforcement source has told The Inquirer. Police found evidence linking John Parsons Wheeler 3d to devices planted at the New Castle home of a neighbor with whom he had been feuding, said the source, who is close to the investigation. The feud was over the size of the neighbor's house, which was under construction in the city's historic district.

He chose West Point over Yale, knowing he'd be sent to an unwinnable war. He survived Vietnam, then led the tumultuous effort to create a memorial on the National Mall. He attended the best law and business schools, but he remained in public service. He helped the Pentagon plan for nuclear war in one century and cyber warfare in the next. He was the first chief executive of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Now, Delaware authorities are trying to learn how and why John Parsons Wheeler 3d was killed.

HE WAS a West Point-trained Vietnam War vet who spent the last three years of the George W. Bush administration as a top Air Force official working on highly sensitive projects like cyberwarfare that could be used against adversaries like Iran. But that was just one résumé line in the remarkable career of John Wheeler III, 66 - a driving force behind the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, first chief executive of Mothers Against Drunk Driving and ex-secretary of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Within weeks, discarded televisions and computer equipment in New Jersey will go from trash to treasure. A state law that bans landfilling the equipment, and encourages its recycling, goes into effect Jan. 1. Similar to e-waste laws in nearly two dozen states - including Pennsylvania, where Gov. Rendell signed legislation last month - the Jersey law switches the recycling onus from consumers and taxpayers, making manufacturers ultimately responsible...