By James DeWeese
During a borough board meeting in Kew Gardens, Doherty told Borough President Helen Marshall, community board chairmen and City Council members that the proposed plan will concentrate all of Queens' city-administered waste at two facilities: a city-owned marine transfer station in College Point and a private truck-to-rail facility on Review Avenue in Maspeth.Community Boards 2 and 5, which cover the area around the Review Avenue site, have come out against the plan, which they said would inundate their neighborhoods with new truck traffic. Trucks carrying up to 1,220 tons of residential waste would move in and out of the facility every day.Doherty said truck traffic at the site might not necessarily decrease, but that the number of long-haul tractor trailers now used to remove 46 percent of the city's waste would decline dramatically.”Currently it's trucked out,” Doherty said of the city's waste. “It's something that many people don't like and they want to get rid of.”Under the new plan, 87 percent of the city's solid waste would leave the city for landfills to the south and west in sealed containers loaded onto barges and railcars. Trash-hauling tractor trailers would drive three million fewer miles on city roads.The plan, which Doherty said would distribute waste-collection facilities more equitably across the five boroughs, also calls for the ground-up reconstruction of the marine transfer station at College Point. As many as 32 trucks a day would enter the state-of-the-art city-owned facility, where they would unload up to 2,200 tons of residential waste and 1,000 tons of commercial waste every day. The waste would be placed in sealed transport containers and shipped out on barges, all from within the confines of a facility that would have negative air pressure to contain odors and force them through a neutralization system.”It's environmentally sound, it's efficient and it's equitable,” Doherty said.Reach reporter James DeWeese by e-mail at news@timesledger.com or by phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 157.
