Dump Is Time Capsule

Paul Peterson, a Montauk resident, could have won a million dollars in a Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes in the early 1980s, but he threw away the envelope without opening it. Like most of the garbage thrown out in those days, it was buried in one of the East Hampton Town landfills, presumably forever.

It resurfaced last fall, though, intact. Mr. Peterson, now a payloader operator, uncovered it himself during an archeological-type dig at the landfills.

The Town Board hired the company he works for, Grimes Contracting, to dig test pits in the landfills, two off Springs-Fireplace Road in East Hampton and one off Montauk Point State Boulevard. The pits would help determine whether it would make sense, financially and environmentally, to mine out the recyclable materials buried there since the early 1960s.

Mining Or Capping

The alternative is to build permanent caps over the mounds and monitor them in perpetuity for methane and groundwater contamination.

Either capping or mining is mandatory, but it is not known yet which would be cheaper. Engineers say a cap would be guaranteed to fail within 20 years, requiring costly repairs.

Mining the recyclables, trucking the remaining trash to an incinerator, and using the soil and gravel found in the dumps to reclaim the land would eliminate the monitoring costs and environmental scars that landfills present.

New Perspective

Mr. Peterson's payloader scooped up his discarded sweepstakes ticket with a load of sand and trash. Debbie Grimes, who periodically checked on the digging, screening, and separating operation for her family's company, happened to be there the day it was spotted on a screening machine.

"It was amazing to me that when the bags were ripped open, the garbage looked exactly the same as when it was thrown in. It gave me a whole new perspective on garbage," she said.

No Papers

At the deepest core of one pit the diggers found a perfectly preserved copy of Newsday from 1963. Newspapers, in various degrees of decomposition, were found layered throughout all three cells. Mysteriously, though, there were almost none in the Montauk landfill in layers thought to date from the late 1960s.

Clearly, Montauk residents weren't throwing newspapers out with the trash in those days, though the engineers analyzing the contents of the test pits aren't sure why, John Wingate of Fanning, Phillips, and Molnar told the Town Board on Jan. 3, when the Ronkonkoma-based firm presented its first round of findings.

Perhaps the papers were being burned in fireplaces and wood stoves, he told the board, or maybe the fishing was good and wrappers were needed, he joked later on.

In any case, the landfills revealed themselves to be truly rural and fairly benign in character - small-town dumps containing small-town garbage - which would certainly influence what happens to them in the future, Mr. Wingate said.

Like all landfills, though, they are not going to disappear on their own, no matter how much decomposable material they contain.

Plastic garbage bags, which appeared on the market sometime in the early 1970s, do not decompose. The diggers easily spotted the first layer of bags - garbage was land-filled in layers, separated by a covering of sand and soil - hanging down the sides of the pits like shabby garlands.

Mostly Sand And Soil

The engineers' breakdown show ed 64 percent of the two East Hampton cells and 75 percent of the Montauk cell was composed of sand and soil, which could be reused at little or no cost. The State Department of Environmental Conservation, concerned about contaminants, would most likely limit the reuse to one site or to another landfill.

"It looks like a nice topsoil. You could probably sell it, if the D.E.C. allowed you to," Kevin Phillips, a partner in the engineering firm, said. Supervisor Cathy Lester suggested it could be run through the nearby composting plant "and sterilized."

Various forms of metal, the only other material that could be recycled easily and cheaply, were estimated to represent less than 2 percent of the cells' contents.

The rest of the trash would most likely have to be trucked to an incinerator, the engineers advised, including the plastic bags and other forms of plastic, which were figured at about 3 percent of the mounds off Springs-Fireplace Road and about 4 percent of the Montauk cell.

Clear Of Toxins

Altogether, at each landfill, Grimes Contracting dug eight 20-foot-deep test pits and removed 2,400 cubic yards of material. All of it was put through a series of screens and conveyor belts that separated the sand and soil from heavier gravel.

Samples of the mined materials were sent to an independent lab, and tested clear of toxins, which could otherwise have called an abrupt halt to the mining idea and may have pointed to capping as the safest solution.

Odor, a lesser standard in the test, was "pretty strong" when the top third of the pits was being processed, but disappeared farther down, where moisture and subsequent putrefaction had ceased to exist.

The diggers got only one complaint, said Mr. Wingate, and that was from an Accabonac Highway resident whose house was in the path of "a steady northwest wind" for a couple of days straight.

D.E.C. Will Decide

While the Town Board must decide for itself whether mining is financially worth the trouble, the D.E.C. will have the final say.

The D.E.C. approved the mining study several years ago, but a lawsuit between the town and the agency over the permanent shutdown of the landfills delayed its start.

The State Energy Research Development Agency has given a $58,000 grant to the cause. The town borrowed the rest of the roughly $265,000 expense.

The D.E.C. recognized mining as a possible alternative to capping about nine years ago, and several feasibility studies like the one here have been done since then. Generally, the findings in other towns have been promising.

A pilot study in upstate Edinburg indicated its landfill was half soil, and presumably could be reduced by at least half. Hague, also upstate, had similar findings, and has begun a full-scale reclamation as a result.

But Carol Hanson, an owner of East Hampton Landscaping on Springs-Fireplace Road, asked the engineers Friday how, when Edinburg found it cost-prohibitive to mine the deepest part of its landfill, East Hampton could make it work.

Dr. Phillips said the cost analysis was coming, and Supervisor Lester said that, like Edinburg, the town could decide to mine just part of the landfills.

Nowhere To Go

Capping, the other alternative, has been estimated to cost more than $25 million, plus a considerable, though as yet unknown, amount per year to monitor the mounds for methane and groundwater contamination.

Mr. Wingate said his office was still at work on those figures.

Mining, he said, would take about five years, while capping could be completed in about two.

The pair of mountains in East Hampton measure about 2.5 million cubic yards altogether and the one in Montauk about 820,000 cubic yards, said Mr. Wingate.

They began as trenches that were eventually filled, leaving sanitation workers nowhere to go but up.