On clear days you can see the downtown skyline from almost four miles away at the apogee of this man-made hill in northeast Greensboro, the spires and rooftops pushing through a tree cover that blankets the city like a leafy quilt.

Something stinks in this corner of Greensboro, though you might not realize it standing here on the rise admiring the view. It’s been stinking since roughly 1940, when the US Army dug a bug hole out here and started throwing garbage in it. Time and technology have affected the site, now known as the White Street Sanitary Landfill, but it is now what it will ever be: a hole in the ground — or, more accurately, holes in the ground — filled with garbage. Greensboro’s garbage. Our garbage.

But right now, from the top of this mound, it smells like the great outdoors tinged with diesel fumes and, if you get too close to the compost heaps, each as big as a brachiosaur, the strangely life-affirming aroma of organic decomposition.

The fresh country air is noteworthy for two reasons. For one, this landfill has been more or less closed to household waste, known in garbage terms as “municipal solid waste” or MSW, since January 2007. And MSW, as any seasoned trash carrier can tell you, is the stuff that really smells: banana peels, dirty diapers, spilled milk and everything else we haul out to our curbs once a week. For another, this grassy mound with the view, which covers 85 acres and rises some 700 feet above sea level, is itself made of garbage, built layer by layer of MSW and god knows what else in the unregulated years between 1940 and 1978, then topped off with construction and demolition debris (known in garbage-speak as C&D) before it was capped and left to the flora and fauna.

This was Phase I of the municipal landfill, opened before environmental agencies and governmental authorities took much interest in household garbage. It occupies a small cranny at the center of the nearly 1,000-acre facility.

Adjacent to it, in the northeast corner, Phase II continues to rise against the backdrop of trees and kudzu vines. Phase II, a 135-acre pile, has been in operation since the state permits cleared in 1978, though it stopped taking MSW in 1997. Now the pile grows by roughly 275 tons per day, C&D from job sites throughout the Triad. Most of it looks just like the stuff Geronimo Gonzalez unloaded from the bed of his pickup earlier in the day: pressboard, planks thorned with bent nails, empty caulk tubes, Drywall scrap. The rubbish goes to the top of the pile, is broken down and compressed by 120,000-pound tractors designed specifically for the job and then gets covered with six inches of dirt before nightfall. When the section fills up, it is sealed off and another is begun on top of it. At this rate, and with no improvements or additions, Phase II should last perhaps another nine years according to Greensboro Environmental Director Jeryl Covington. Maybe more — like everything else, it seems, the life span of the White Street Landfill is tied to the real estate market. More construction and demolition mean more C&D Today, the active portion of Phase II smells a bit like lumber and dust. The stink — and in 2009, the stink is a metaphorical one — is coming from Phase III, a 50-acre swath in the southwest corner of the White Street Landfill, the quadrant of the property closest to residential neighborhoods.

The stink is metaphorical because people stopped complaining about the smell in 2006, when the city stopped bringing the garbage of its citizens into the city-owned landfill and began shipping it 70 or so miles away to a privately owned one in Montgomery County. Phase III still accepts a limited amount of what is technically deemed MSW — ashes and screening from city wastewater treatment plants that looks like dirt and unspeakably gross debris — but the turkey vultures have stopped hovering above the pile and the litter fence around it has been windblown into disrepair.

The 2006 “closing” of the White Street Landfill can be looked at in myriad ways. It was a boon to residents of Nealtown Road, a city-subsidized community conceived, built and sold in the shadow of the landfill while it was in full operation in the 1990s. It was an early political victory for Goldie Wells, the Greensboro City Council member who represents the neighborhoods in District 2 that are closest to the landfill — she attempted to close debate on the subject at a council meeting earlier this spring. Former Greensboro Mayor Keith Holliday considered it a necessary step towards a long-term waste solution.

Current Mayor Yvonne Johnson, who lives within a mile or two of White Street, has spoken publicly against reopening the facility to MSW, though she says she would explore the possibility of “mining” the existing landfill if a technological solution were to arise that could turn the refuse into energy or raw materials. And current District 4 Representative Mike Barber called the “closing” of the White Street Landfill “the worst economic decision made by this city since 1808.”

“All of this goes back to when we decided to go left instead of right,” Keith Holliday says from a patio table in downtown Greensboro, less than four miles from the White Street Landfill.

Holliday served on Greensboro City Council from 1995 until 1999, when he was elected mayor, a post he would hold until he left city politics in 2007. During his time on council, he saw the residents of Nealtown Gardens bring suit against the city in 1995, charging environmental racism, and a 1996 settlement by the city, which agreed to cover residents’ financial losses when they couldn’t sell their homes. As mayor, he oversaw the July 2001 council decision to wind the landfill to a close by 2008 and “actively pursue other options,” options which city staff were to report on two months later at a special meeting to be held on Sept. 11, 2001. Needless to say, the meeting never happened. He was mayor in 2006, when the Burnt Poplar Road transfer station was completed, and he was mayor in 2007, when the White Street Landfill stopped taking the city’s household refuse.

Antonio Woods, 22, is one of the few residents of Nealtown Road who thinks the White street landfill should be reopened to municipal solid waste. His family members in the neighborhood disagree. (photos by Brian clarey)

The city could have expanded the facility at White Street in 2001, which, he says, would have extended its life another 10 years. Or he could have listened to waste-industry lobbyists whom he says were interested in establishing their own landfills and paying “host fees” to the municipalities in which they were located.

“I was looking for a 50- to 75-year solution,” he says, “not an 18- to 20-year one.” He says the formula included the time frame left for the White Street facility; the cost of buying buffer land and neighboring homes; the construction of a new road to the landfill; the cost of digging and lining a new hole in the ground; the income the landfill brought in from tipping fees, methane and compost sales; and the probable growth of the city through population increase and annexation.

“What you need to think of is trash as a commodity,” he says. “‘I can make money off that trash, and science is going to protect me from any negative environmental impact.’ The impact on the neighbors is more perception than anything.

“[We didn’t close the landfill] because we had three dozen residents complaining,” he adds. “It was a business decision.”

And in the end, he says, it just didn’t make sense, financial or otherwise, to keep the White Street facility open to MSW. He believed the landfill could not suit our purposes much longer.

Barber disagrees. In an e-mail exchange, he writes, “I would like to see us investing in the landfill so that it will be a viable option for 50 to 75 years or until the landfill concept becomes obsolete.”

To be fair, he made similar statements last April. Barber has said he is not seeking reelection for his district seat. Mayor Johnson has announced her candidacy this year, perhaps making her position a bit more circumspect.

“I’m really look for the win-win situation between the people who live [near the landfill] and the total population of Greensboro,” she says.

A long-term solution makes sense in that the problem of what to do with our garbage is a constant. But the solution itself is a moving target.

The White Street Landfill has a life span that is dependent on variables. Covington says that, as it stands, the landfill has estimably 1.9 million cubic yards of airspace available in Phase III, and that C&D waste can be compacted to about 1,000 pounds per cubic yard. The landfill currently takes on about 100,000 tons of C&D per year, Covington says, giving it a projected 9.5-year lifespan under its current configuration. Though MSW can be compacted more tightly than C&D, Covington says, taking it on would mean another 2,000 tons a day into the hole, significantly shortening the lifespan of the facility. The clock is ticking on Phase II as well; Covington says that at current capacity it will have to be capped some time around 2011. There are other vagaries to the garbage dilemma.

You can see the Greensboro skyline from the city landfill, about four miles away. The landfill, which opened in the 1940s, is on the northeast border of the city. Unfortunately, the city grew towards the landfill.

And the decision to phase out White Street had already been made. “One thing had to happen,” Holliday says. “Either way we needed a transfer station, no matter what we did. And we decided to build a Cadillac.”

Out by the airport, nestled among the petrol tanks of the Colonial Pipeline, Greensboro’s Solid Waste Transfer Station processes between 400 and 1,100 tons of MSW a day, six days a week. Out in the parking lot, where the open-bed trailers await their cargo, the smell of raw trash can hide behind the astringent scent of the pipeline, the funk of jet exhaust that permeates the air.

But inside the open structure, on the tipping floor, the stink is as overwhelming as it is indescribable, a malodorous presence so palpable it induces muscles to clench and eyes to water.

The room is cavernous, like a hockey arena, and on the floor big tractors push mounds of MSW from seven neighboring counties down through a hole in the floor into a waiting open trailer. A tamping crane pushes each load down until it approaches 80,000 pounds. On a busy day, as many as 30 such truckloads will make the 150-mile round trip to the landfill in Montgomery County.

The price tag for this maneuver, like everything else in the garbage business, can swing widely with variances in the price of diesel, the number of trucks making the trip, even the time of day they leave. Add to that the tipping fee collected at the landfill, which the city has negotiated to about $25 per ton. The monthly tab for hauling and disposal averages about $646,500.

Barber contrasts that with the White Street operation. “For a local government,” he writes, “it is insanity to forfeit over one BILLION dollars of value.” The caps are his. It’s true: The White Street Landfill has always been a moneymaker, even now in its diminished capacity.

The landfill makes money several ways. Back when it was the repository for Greensboro’s MSW, it saved the city from paying tipping fees or outsourcing to private waste companies. The landfill still collects tipping fees of its own — $31 to $40 a ton. Collected yard waste is mulched and left to compost for a year before being sold to farmers, gardeners and landscapers. And a vacuum system exists amid the piles of MSW that comprise Phase III, collecting the methane created by decomposition as decreed by state law. According to Covington, about 576 million standard cubic feet of methane is provided to Cone Mills by the city free of charge as an economic incentive. The rest of the annual production, about 440 million standard cubic feet, is flared off into the atmosphere.

“We are burning it because of our contract with Duke Power,” Mayor Johnson says. “That’s going to be up soon and we will be able to sell all of the methane.”

Add yet another variable to the garbage equation: The existing levels of MSW in Phase III will continue to passively produce methane for perhaps another 30 years. But if the supply of trash ceases

permanently, the sustainable fuel source will eventually run out.

At the mulching station of the White Street Landfill, a tracked backhoe pushes last fall’s leaves into tall piles. A loader grabs dark shovelfuls and sifts them down between

the spinning vertical brushes of the screener, where the mulch tumbles in what looks like a giant dryer drum. The good, salable mulch is conveyed on a belt to form a pile on the side; overage comes straight out the back to be shoveled up and run through the screener again.

Less than a mile away on Nealtown Road, where residents are slow to leave their homes on this searing Wednesday morning, the grind and clang of heavy machinery is lost to the ether.

Lisa Neal, who lives near the corner of Nealtown Road and White Street, gets her mail to the chirping of birds and the buzz of a pushmower. It’s a well-kept quarter of brick ranch homes, tended lawns and backyard gardens, where people still sit on their porches and many of them are kin. At the June 2 city council meeting, some 40 citizens from communities near the landfill came to testify against Barber’s suggestion that the landfill be reopened.

Chief among their complaints were criticisms about the smell, which does not attract new business and development; the loud traffic of heavy garbage trucks on White Street; and health concerns about contaminated soil and groundwater. Former council member Claudette Burroughs-White, who lived in the area and died from cancer in 2006, was quoted as calling herself a “walking time bomb” from her years in proximity to the landfill.

But Neal says the air hasn’t smelled around here since she was a little girl. And she says she has not seen any detrimental health issues among her family and neighbors.

“My Daddy and them have been here 60 years,” she says. “My Daddy’s fine. Nobody else seems affected around here.” She allows that nobody seems to miss the rumble of garbage trucks down White Street.

“Once the trucks stopped running, it got a lot more pleasant around here,” Neal says. “We don’t want to go anywhere — this is home. We don’t want to move and we don’t want [the landfill] back. But it don’t matter what we want.” Around the corner, her nephew Antonio Woods, 22, lazes shirtless in his front yard after filling a trailer with branches, clippings and other yard waste that will soon be contributed to the landfill. He only recently found out that the landfill was no longer the recipient of Greensboro’s household waste, and thought it strange that we bring it so far away when the landfill is, quite literally, in the city’s backyard.

“They need to reopen it,” he says. “It’s closer and it would be cheaper.” “I think it is a very divisive issue,” Mayor Johnson says. “I bet you anything you put [a landfill] anywhere in Greensboro it would be an uproar. Nobody wants to live like that.” And still the clock ticks and the garbage piles up. “If you look at the waste streams combined,” Covington says, “[we generate] about a ton of waste per person. We process 230,000 tons of waste per year, and our population last year was 220,000.”

‘If you look at the waste streams combined, [we generate] about a ton of waste per person. We process 230,000 tons of waste per year, and our population last year was 220,000.’ — Jeryl Covington