This New Jersey Museum Could Be Called a Real Dump

The 32-square-mile New Jersey wasteland known as Hackensack Meadowlands is full of garbage. No surprise. That swampland has served generations as both official and unofficial dumping grounds.

But in recent years, with the establishment of the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission and the construction of the New Jersey Meadowlands Sports and Exposition Complex, the area has finally gotten around to cleaning up its act.

Opened last fall of the commission’s Environment Center Museum, the public is now invited to stroll through the center of a simulated landfill for a close look at the nation’s garbage problem.

Completely covering the walls and ceiling of the museum’s “Tunnel of Trash” are soap pads and cereal boxes, milk containers, soda-pop bottles, egg cartons and other junk, all jammed in with a variety of bald tires, old telephones, rusty car parts and garden hoses.

The visual effects are overwhelming. A recorded narration describes the plight of a garbage-engulfed planet.

Placards randomly placed on mounds of debris emphasize the depth of our waste dilemma--”Americans throw away 38,000 tons of glass each day” and “Every day we toss out enough aluminum cans to make about 30 jet planes.” Peepholes into a biodegradability exhibit offer a glimpse of what today’s landfill will look like in 100 years. Cereal boxes and banana peels will have decayed, but glass bottles and plastic items will be virtually unchanged.

Other displays offer insights that may lead to solutions: wall-mounted pictorials depict incineration, composting, recycling and other methods of trash disposal; the history of paper is traced through cookie advertising, and an urban salt marsh similar to the Meadowlands is recreated in a diorama with a fish-filled brackish creek and proofs of recent changes for the better. There is hope for Planet Earth.

The view from the Environment Center’s windows is even more hopeful. Yes, those 150-foot-tall hills to one side are actually ancient mounds of garbage, and trash trucks still ply the rutted road leading past the center. But the smell of underground dump fires no longer fouls the air, and, to the east, stretching out before Manhattan’s familiar skyline, reclaimed wetlands are once more teeming with herons, egrets, turtles and other wildlife.

The Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission Environment Center Museum is in Lyndhurst, N.J., at 2 DeKorte Park Plaza, just west of the New Jersey Turnpike. It is open year-round Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.; closed holidays. The building is accessible to wheelchairs. Admission is $1 for adults, free for children under 12. For more information, call (201) 460-8300.