Retaining walls similar to this one on another Meadowlands landfill will be built at the 1D landfill in Kearny.

Scott Fallon reports for The Record:

A 94-acre landfill in the Meadowlands will be walled off to prevent oil, insecticides, sewage sludge and a slew of other toxic waste from leaching into the Passaic River under a $39.4 million project announced Monday by state officials.

Workers will begin preparations this week to build a containment wall around the 1D landfill in Kearny. It will hold the tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater that leaches into the surrounding waterways every day.

When the project is completed in two years, as much as 83,000 gallons of landfill wastewater, called leachate, will be collected daily under a newly built system. It will be sent to the Passaic Valley Sewerage Authority’s plant for treatment. Landfill gases like methane that now discharge to the air will be captured and burned to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

“It will begin with the clearing of trees and shrubs and proceed with construction of a containment wall that will be up to 50 feet deep,” said Mark Pedersen, assistant commissioner for site remediation and waste management at the state Department of Environmental Protection.

The project, one of the largest landfill closures the DEP has ever done, has been a long time coming.