A Capacity Cliff, Not a Price Negotiation
Most communities that talk to Carbotura want a better disposal price. Brookhaven’s situation is different. The Brookhaven Landfill at 350 Horseblock Road in Yaphank is the last major disposal asset of its kind on Long Island. It sits inside a roughly 500-acre Town-owned waste-management complex, open since 1974. Its permit expires 11 July 2026, with the Town seeking an extension into 2027–2028. Acceptance of construction and demolition debris ended at the close of 2024.
The Long Island Landfill Law of 1983 was enacted after landfill leachate was found in the region’s groundwater. That groundwater is a federally designated sole-source aquifer — the only practical drinking-water supply for the people who live above it. The law banned new landfills across Long Island and closed all but two by 1989; municipal solid waste landfilling on Long Island ended in 1990. A replacement landfill is not permittable. When capacity at Yaphank ends, there is no legal local replacement to build.
Since 1990 the Town has run an “Ash for Trash” arrangement. Town municipal solid waste goes to the Covanta Hempstead waste-to-energy facility for combustion, and the ash returns to Yaphank for landfilling — on the order of 350,000 tons a year. When Yaphank stops accepting ash, that loop has nowhere to close.
- ✗Landfill permit expires 11 July 2026, extension sought only into 2027–2028
- ✗No replacement landfill can be permitted anywhere on Long Island
- ✗Material goes to Covanta Hempstead; ash returns to Yaphank — a loop with a closing end
- ✗The endorsed regional answer is rail export — a permanent, escalating cost
- ✗The Town receives no revenue from its material; it only pays to move it
- ✗Every export dollar leaves Long Island and returns nothing locally
- ✗No local manufacturing employment from Brookhaven’s material
- ✗Material stays on a landfill pathway above a sole-source aquifer
- ✓Material goes to a locally sited ACM facility in the Yaphank corridor
- ✓A structured 30-year answer to the closure of the Town’s own capacity
- ✓A Circular Royalty™ on every ton processed, growing every year for 30 years
- ✓The Town commits no capital, issues no bonds, and allocates no budget
- ✓~200 direct manufacturing jobs at Phase Initial; ~600 at Phase Expanded
- ✓Material leaves the landfill pathway the 1983 Law was written to end
- ✓Manufacturing value stays on Long Island instead of being exported
- ✓Material becomes synthetic graphite, graphene compounds and recovered minerals, plus net-positive ultrapure water
How the Circular Royalty™ Flows Back to the Community
The Circular Royalty™ is paid to the Town of Brookhaven, not to individual households. What the Town does with it is a decision for the Town Board and the residents it answers to. The income can hold down the solid waste district charge, maintain services, fund infrastructure, or support the post-closure obligations the Town already carries at Yaphank.
What is structural, rather than a forecast: today Brookhaven pays to move its material and receives nothing back. Under a Circular Supply Agreement (CSA), the Town pays a Beneficiation Fee (TMC Fee) and receives a Circular Royalty™ that exceeds it per ton from Year 2 onward. That is a change in the direction the money moves.
What Is Happening at the Landfill Right Now
Separately from anything Carbotura proposes, the Town is in an active corrective-measures process with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC). The Town submitted a draft Corrective Measures Report dated May 2026. On 5 August 2026 NYSDEC returned it unapproved, with 40 technical comments: the Town applied the assessment criteria rather than the selection criteria. A revised draft is due within 90 days, on or about 3 November 2026.
Five measures are under evaluation: immediate landfill closure and capping; landfill reclamation; groundwater extraction and treatment; enhanced leachate plume monitoring; and municipal water connections. The contaminants of concern named in the correspondence are PFAS and 1,4-dioxane. Choosing among the measures is the Town’s decision, not NYSDEC’s. The Department reviews the Town’s selection and the reasoning behind it.
Where Reclamation Fits — and Exactly What Carbotura Does and Does Not Do
This part is easy to overstate, so here it is precisely. 6 NYCRR Part 363-10.1(b)(2)(iii) requires a corrective measure to “control the sources of releases to the maximum extent practical.” Landfill reclamation is the measure that acts on the source itself: it removes the buried material rather than managing what continues to leave it. Less material in the ground means less material able to release anything.
What Carbotura does — and what it does not
Carbotura accepts landfill leachate and wastewater treatment sludge as feedstock streams, alongside solid material. In that material, PFAS and PFOS are destroyed — the process breaks material down to its elements, and contaminant molecules cannot survive that. Nothing is captured into a filter or concentrated into a residue that still has to be disposed of. Leachate is what keeps carrying contaminants out of the landfill year after year, so accepting it is ongoing source control. If material were excavated, an ACM facility is somewhere for that mass to be manufactured into products rather than landfilled elsewhere.
Now the limit, stated plainly. Carbotura does not operate a groundwater extraction system — no wells, no pump-and-treat plant, no discharge of treated water. Carbotura can only act on material brought to the facility, so it does not reach contamination that has already spread into the aquifer. What is already in the groundwater stays a groundwater problem. Carbotura will not clean Brookhaven’s drinking water, and nothing here should be read that way. The corrective measure for the existing plume remains the Town’s to select.
NYSDEC has not endorsed, selected, approved, or considered Carbotura, and Carbotura is not a corrective measure. Reclamation is a measure; Carbotura is one possible destination for reclaimed material if the Town were ever to choose that route.
Who Pays — and the One Pathway That Pays the Town
The cost framework in the Town’s own Report is expressed three ways: total debt repayment, the total annual property tax increase across the township, and the annual tax impact to the average home over the term of borrowing. In plain terms, every measure under evaluation is paid for by Brookhaven taxpayers. No dollar figures are quoted here on purpose: NYSDEC’s comments challenge the Report’s cost calculations as containing errors, so none of those numbers is settled.
A Circular Supply Agreement runs the other way. Where legacy landfill material is extracted and processed under the CSA’s optional legacy-reclamation add-on — the Exogenesis™ pathway — Carbotura pays the Town $50.00 per ton of legacy mass extracted and processed. That rate escalates 1.0% a year from the second year of extraction, beginning 13 months after the first extraction. It runs alongside the ordinary Circular Royalty™. The money moves toward the Town rather than onto the tax bill.
Environmental Performance (Designed-For, Phase Initial)
Designed-for figures at 400 TPD (146,000 tons per year), using a baseline of 0.45 tCO₂e displaced per tonne processed. Subject to independent verification at Deployment Study.
At Phase Expanded (1,200 TPD · 438,000 tons per year), the same basis gives approximately 197,100 tCO₂e displaced per year.
The Town pays a Beneficiation Fee (TMC Fee) on the material it delivers and receives a Circular Royalty™ on the same material. The royalty rate starts at 120% of that year’s fee and rises one percentage point a year, reaching 150%.
Carbotura offers a single commercial structure: the Circular Supply Agreement (CSA). There is nothing for the Town to choose between.
Your Material. Your Royalty.
The Circular Royalty™ is not a rebate, a discount, or a bonus. It is a contractual payment written into the Circular Supply Agreement (CSA) from day one, paid to the Town for the life of the agreement. Step by step:
The Per-Ton Schedule
Separate transactions — this applies everywhere on this page. The Beneficiation Fee (TMC Fee) and the Circular Royalty™ sit under separate provisions of the CSA. They are reported independently, as two gross amounts, and are never combined into a single figure.
| Year | Beneficiation Fee | Circular Royalty™ |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | $100.00 | — (13-month lag) |
| 2 | $102.50 | $120.00 |
| 5 | $110.38 | $132.46 |
| 10 | $124.89 | $155.96 |
| 20 | $159.87 | $215.23 |
| 30 | $204.64 | $295.48 |
Royalty figures are amounts received. The royalty is paid 13 months in arrears, so the figure shown for a year is earned on the previous year’s delivered tonnage.
All dollar figures are ILLUSTRATIVE, computed at a $100.00 Year-1 Beneficiation Fee. The formulas are canonical and fixed; the fee itself is set at Term Sheet.
What That Means at Scale
Town-wide addressable feedstock is ESTIMATED at approximately 1,102 tons per day (~402,000 tons a year), from a Long Island regional average of 4.5 lb per person per day applied to the Town’s 2024 Census population of 489,810. The Town does not publish a town-wide generation figure. A Deployment Study must verify this against Town and hauler-specific manifests before any binding CSA economics.
Yaphank / Horseblock Road
350 Horseblock Road, Yaphank
Nassau County
What People Ask
An Advanced Circular Manufacturing (ACM) module in the Yaphank / Horseblock Road corridor. ACM modules are manufactured products, built to specification and integrated on site, not one-off construction projects. The module takes in the Town’s material and manufactures synthetic graphite, graphene compounds and recovered minerals, plus net-positive ultrapure water. Carbotura finances, deploys, owns and operates it. The Town invests nothing.
No capital commitment. No bond issuance, no Town capital, no budget allocation. No construction debt and no operating cost carried by the Town. The Town’s only financial commitment under the Circular Supply Agreement (CSA) is the Beneficiation Fee (TMC Fee) per ton on material it already collects and pays to move today. If the facility underperforms, that is Carbotura’s exposure, not the Town’s.
A contractual payment from Carbotura to the Town on every ton processed. It begins 13 months after Carbotura’s receipt of the first Beneficiation Fee (TMC Fee) payment, so the first royalty falls in Year 2. Illustratively, the Town then pays $102.50 per ton and receives $120.00; by Year 30 it pays $204.64 and receives $295.48. Exact amounts depend on the fee set at Term Sheet.
Rail export is a real and workable way to move material off Long Island, and all ten Suffolk Town Supervisors and the County Executive have endorsed it. The question is what it costs over 30 years and what it returns. It converts a closing asset into a permanent, escalating operating cost, and every dollar of that leaves the local economy.
Advanced Circular Manufacturing does the opposite. The material stays, the manufacturing value stays, roughly 200 permanent jobs stay, and a Circular Royalty™ comes back to the Town every year for 30 years. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive; a Deployment Study would size how much of Brookhaven’s stream ACM can address.
By removing material from the landfill pathway rather than managing what it leaves behind — source control, as set out above. Carbotura accepts leachate and sludge as feedstock, and PFAS and PFOS in that material are destroyed. The facility would be permitted through NYSDEC Region 1 under the Part 360 series.
The limit, stated exactly: Carbotura does not operate a groundwater extraction system — no wells, no pump-and-treat plant, no discharge of treated water. It does not reach contamination already dispersed in the aquifer. Carbotura will not clean Brookhaven’s drinking water. The existing plume is a separate corrective measure, and selecting it remains the Town’s decision.
Skilled manufacturing and operations roles — process technicians, controls and instrumentation, maintenance, quality, materials handling, logistics and site management. The planning basis is 50 direct full-time positions per 100 TPD, giving roughly 200 at Phase Initial (400 TPD) and roughly 600 at Phase Expanded (1,200 TPD). These are permanent local positions tied to the operating facility, not temporary deployment roles. Figures are estimates, confirmed at Deployment Study.
Carbotura designs and operates manufacturing facilities: material goes in as feedstock and manufactured products come out. The regulatory position needs precision, though. Under New York law today, the facility would be permitted through the NYSDEC Part 360 series. Carbotura does not claim the facility has achieved, or will automatically achieve, End-of-Waste, by-product or non-waste manufacturing classification. That transition is a pathway Carbotura pursues, not an accomplished fact.
The permit expires on 11 July 2026, with an extension sought only into 2027–2028, and no replacement landfill is permittable on Long Island. Deploying, permitting and integrating an ACM module takes time, beginning with a pre-application meeting with the NYSDEC Region 1 Regional Permit Administrator. Starting does not commit the Town to anything: the first step is a Deployment Study, which establishes verified feedstock volumes and the local cost baseline before any binding terms exist.
This overview uses planning-basis estimates where confirmed figures are not yet available. Town-wide feedstock volume is ESTIMATED and requires Deployment Study verification. All dollar figures are ILLUSTRATIVE, computed at a $100.00 Year-1 Beneficiation Fee; the fee is set at Term Sheet. Employment and carbon figures are planning-basis estimates. The structural relationships are contractually standard, not estimates: the Town commits no capital, pays a Beneficiation Fee (TMC Fee) on delivered material, and receives a Circular Royalty™ that exceeds it per ton from Year 2, as separate transactions. Carbotura makes no claim that the facility has achieved End-of-Waste, by-product or non-waste classification under New York law. Prepared by Carbotura, Inc. for the Town of Brookhaven, New York. Contact: info[at]carbotura.com