Oyster Bay razes out-of-service smokestacks and recycling plant at Old Bethpage landfill

A yellow excavator climbed over the rubble on a recent weekday morning where the Town of Oyster Bay's recycling plant once stood, part of ongoing demolition work at the 135-acre landfill property.

Gramercy Group, a Wantagh-based construction firm, has razed three out-of-service structures spanning about 12 acres in Old Bethpage. That included two smokestacks, plus the buildings attached to them, that were last used to incinerate garbage in the 1980s. The third structure, a vacant recycling plant, is also being demolished. Now, town officials are mulling over options for the property as demolition work draws to a close. 

The first phase of the demolition — the removal of old smokestacks — finished in February 2024. In October, the contractor began to raze the three structures. That second phase is expected to end in the coming weeks, officials said.

“They’re almost completely done with it,” Daniel Pearl, Oyster Bay’s sanitation commissioner, said as he looked over the rubble. “Just the mere fact that it’s coming down is tremendous.”

The Old Bethpage Solid Waste Complex is a sprawling facility on Bethpage-Sweet Hollow Road. During a tour of the site last week, Pearl pointed to a staging area where about two dozen trucks remove sorted trash from the complex to other facilities including in Pennsylvania and upstate New York.

Oyster Bay Supervisor Joseph Saladino said in a statement the demolition of the buildings demonstrates “a major step forward in modernizing operations, improving the site’s aesthetics, and minimizing its environmental impact.”

Town officials have been talking about the property's future for years and have floated the idea of new recycling and waste transfer facilities.

Oyster Bay is “in the process of developing a long-term plan that removes the community eyesores and enhances the exterior aesthetics with fence improvements and landscaping,” town spokesman Brian Nevin told Newsday.

No impact to landfill cap

The town collects  trash, from yard waste and household appliances to construction material and electronics. The waste and debris are sorted into different sections.

A large green and gray building reminiscent of an aircraft hanger, built in the 1980s, with seven bay doors about 30-feet tall, is where much of the garbage goes before it's dumped into an open trailer. The transfer happens usually within 24 hours of it arriving on site, Pearl said.

The facility processes about 120,000 tons of solid waste annually, Pearl said.

Nearby, a capped landfill that was closed in 1986 barely produces methane anymore, Pearl said. The town is looking to decommission the system that once captured the gas.

The work will not affect the capped landfill, and "the incinerator process will never be reactivated," Saladino said in a statement.

Eyesore eliminated

Excavators have been working through the debris of the structures.

The vacant buildings had been “an eyesore” in the community, Pearl said. Over the years, the town has been examining different options for the waste sorting complex, including upgrades to existing facilities and plans for new ones.

In 2019, town officials considered replacing the current, 40,000-square-foot waste transfer station and building a new recycling plant.

The existing transfer facility is “nearing the end of its service life," town officials wrote in a request for proposals for that project in 2020.

Officials left open the possibility of having a company build a new recycling management facility on the property that could accept recyclables from other towns and cities.

Nevin said in an email the town “ultimately ruled out RFP responses.”

David Tonjes, the former director of the Waste Data and Analysis Center at Stony Brook University, said the removal of the smokestacks signals “the end of an era.”

The complex is centrally located in the town — making it a convenient site for a recycling plant, Tonjes said.

“The town may be looking at current markets and thinking, ‘we could manage our recyclables and it wouldn’t cost us very much money,'" Tonjes said.

By Joseph Ostapiuk

joseph.ostapiuk@newsday.com@OstapiukJ