With the closure, 150 tons now travel every day to an incinerator in Hempstead, 1,700 tons to a Newark incinerator. The rest of the City's garbage is destined for landfills in New Jersey, Pennsylvania or Virginia. Of 13,200 tons of daily waste, just 850 leave by rail.

The vast majority exits both the city and the region by truck. The truck-based "interim plan" has added 264,000 outbound truck trips annually to NYC's clogged bridges and tunnels. This represents a 2% increase over the number of trucks using the Goethals Bridge, Holland and Lincoln Tunnel and GWB since landfill closure began in 1997 and 14% of the total increase in truck traffic at the crossings since then.

The modal shift has other costs beyond exacerbating congestion. According to the EPA, trucks use three times more fuel than trains to move the same amount of cargo. Under the interim plan, 94% of the City's waste is going more than 75 miles, a distance at which rail becomes a preferred mode. By not shipping that percentage of NYC garbage by train, the interim plan adds nearly 12,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions in New York and New Jersey daily.

For these reasons, many are concerned that the interim plan not become a permanent waste management strategy. The City's long range waste plan would ship waste by barge and rail instead of truck. However, the switch relies on Browning Ferris Industries. plans for a barge-to-rail transfer station in Linden, NJ, now moving forward under the shadow of several lawsuits (MTR #304).