Egg Harbor Township, N.J. ? From the 100-foot hill of the 12th tee at McCullough’s Emerald Golf Links, players negotiate undulating, treeless fairways dotted with sand traps. The casinos of Atlantic City glitter 10 miles away.

Only the clear flame burning from a 20-foot smokestack in the middle of the course, and methane well covers that warn against smoking, give golfers a hint that they are standing atop mounds of garbage.

Mounds, that is, that were capped, covered with 2 feet of soil, threaded with drainage and gas collection systems, topped with grasses, and interspersed with 18 flagsticks, fairways and greens.

The holes on the manicured course are softened versions of legendary European holes. Players at McCullough’s and a growing number of other layouts have found that a course doesn’t have to be trashy just because it’s built on garbage.

About 70 of the nation’s nearly 16,000 golf courses use old landfills, strip mines or industrial “brownfields,” a concept that began 40 years ago and is gaining acceptance despite higher development costs, experts said.

Although the trend preserves virgin land, some environmentalists are opposed to the approach, cautioning that blighted land requires constant monitoring and poses unknown health risks.

The trend is not without controversy. A multiyear battle by New York environmental groups failed to halt work on a course being built atop an old landfill in the Bronx.

Of the nearly 250 courses that opened in 2002, about 10 are on so-called “brownfields,” estimated Roy Case, a golf course architect.

“I think they will increase. It’s putting land that’s useless right now into some sort of public use,” said Case, whose Case Golf Co. is based in Lake Worth, Fla.

Many courses built on reclaimed land, like McCullough’s, are owned by towns and near population centers, so the fees and the course are within reach of the duffer of average means, he said. At McCullough’s, a weekday round costs $60, but $39 for township residents.

In recent years, courses on distressed land have sprouted around the nation: The Jack Nicklaus-designed Old Works Golf Course is at former strip mine in Anaconda, Mont. A former landfill 15 minutes from downtown Houston now hosts the 36 holes of Wildcat Golf Club designed by Case.

A waterfront landfill on Chicago’s industrial south side became Harborside International Golf Center in 1995, and hosted the 2002 SBC Senior Open.

In New Jersey, long an industrial hub, Scotland Run Golf Club in Williamstown, Ballyowen Golf Club in Hamburg and Eagle Ridge Golf Club in Lakewood were all built on old gravel mines.

Other brownfield courses are now being built in the Garden State, including a four-course project on 950 acres of landfills in the Meadowlands, and the Bayonne Golf Club atop a former dump in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

Golfer Jim Burr did not realize he and his buddies were playing on a former municipal dump when they teed off at McCullough’s.

“I like it a lot. I’m surprised they can get this grass to grow,” said Burr, 42, of Bel Air, Md.

The trend toward building on distressed land is giving golf courses a second look from environmentalists, who have long complained that courses use too much water and produce runoff laden with pesticides, herbicides and fertilizer.

The Meadowlands project is to use only stormwater captured at the site and treated wastewater to keep the greens and fairways green, noted Capt. Bill Sheehan, head of the Hackensack Riverkeeper environmental group.

“That actually makes their impact on the local drinking water supply disappear,” Sheehan said. Also, the golf course is to use only organic pesticides and limit pesticide use.

Although courses built on landfills are monitored, Stephen Lester, a scientist with the Center for Health, Environment and Justice is not convinced course operators are up to the challenge.

“There are a range of volatile chemicals that are typically found in general, household garbage landfills,” including benzene and vinyl chloride, which have been linked to cancer in humans, Lester said.

While the Environmental Protection Agency maintains that the small amounts of such agents pose little risk, “we believe that they are toxic in small quantities, especially in combination,” Lester said. However, he noted no studies specifically address the results of exposure to such gases.

The most common landfill gas is methane, which is produced from decaying organic material and is not considered toxic, but which can be explosive. But burning it, as several courses do, can produce toxic chemicals, according to a center report on landfill gases.

Egg Harbor Township leases the land atop the landfill from its owner, Allied Waste Industries Inc., one of the nation’s largest trash hauling and disposal firms. Allied has two full-time workers at McCullough’s and is responsible for collecting, treating and monitoring the gas and liquid produced by decomposition in the landfill, township administrator Peter J. Miller said.

“If you come on the golf course to play, your health is not at risk,” Miller said.

Constructing a public golf course usually costs about $3 million to $4 million, not including land acquisition. Turning a dump into a golf course adds about 25 percent, architect Case estimated.

“They are among the most expensive courses to build, because you’re not just building golf, you are reclaiming the land,” Ron Whitten, the architecture editor for Golf Digest who has visited thousands of courses over the past 20 years. “On the other case, they are a vast improvement over an open sore or a capped sore.”