Will Peischel, Bloomberg News

NEW YORK
EnergiesNet.com 05 25 2022

“Detect a strong putrid odor of rotten garbage in the air.” “Terrible smell!!!! Unbreathable air!!” Thousands of odor complaints like these have been submitted from residents of Doral, Florida, many of them blaming a nearby incinerator for not just the offensive scent, but also respiratory issues from nearby pollution. The facility burns through around 1 million tons of Miami-Dade County’s garbage each year — a relied-upon resource in a county that’s running out of places to dispose of its trash. 

Covanta, the company that runs the facility, says it responds promptly to complaints, deploying technology like smell-neutralizing mists. But with the incinerator’s contract now up for renewal, residents and environmental groups say it’s time to shut it down. 

“It’s almost embarrassing to bring people to a place that smells like trash and is full of ashes,” says Sebastian Caicedo, Miami regional director of Florida Rising, an environmental advocacy group combating the incinerator. 

The push to close the incinerator in Doral follows momentum away from burning garbage across much of the U.S. But in Florida, lawmakers have different ambitions. Miami-Dade’s elected officials have instead proposed a new incinerator in Doral with an estimated cost of up to $1 billion. And in March, proposals to subsidize the incineration of garbage statewide sailed through the Florida legislature with nearly no opposition from lawmakers, and now await the governor’s signature. 

Call it a rotten conundrum. Florida is pushing forward with burning trash, even as environmentalists say incineration is dirty and harmful to public health, and residents say they want it out of their communities. It’s also increasingly expensive. But with limited available land and insufficient room for its garbage, the state says it doesn’t have many choices, particularly given environmental and odor concerns with the primary alternative to incineration: landfills. So what’s a state to do?

The rise and fall of incinerators

Incineration was once touted as the greener, less invasive alternative to landfills, particularly in parts of Europe where the facilities proliferated. Rather than simply allowing garbage to fester, incinerators turn it into energy. 

In the U.S., this waste-to-energy industry saw its heyday in the 1980s, after crippling U.S. energy shortages were accelerated by the 1979 oil crisis, and as environmentalism began to gain popular momentum. 

Among the industries that faced scrutiny for their lack of sustainability was waste management. It sent most of its stuff to leaky, unlined landfills, which allowed toxins to seep into the ground. The time was ripe for a garbage-gobbling, energy-producing technology.

Adding to the contrast were advances in waste incineration technology. The process became far more sophisticated than simply burning gas in an open pit, or, in the case of landfills, leaving it in a pit to decay. Treatment systems were designed to filter out toxins from the gas exhaust, and capture leftover ash.  

Federal legislation in 1978 gave incinerator-created electricity and renewables a fair shake on the energy market by compelling utility companies to purchase power from them for the electrical grid. Dozens of states have gone even further, setting up subsidies for renewable sources, a category that often includes incinerators. (Florida is not one of them.) At the peak of the waste incineration rush, some 400 facilities were under consideration for construction in the U.S.

Then came an abrupt end: “Not a lot of further growth since the spurt in the 1980s, 1990s,” says Paul Gilman, chief sustainability officer at Covanta.

That’s partly because incinerators have become far less financially viable than they once were: Whereas incineration’s reliance on its ability to produce electricity was once a selling point, the advent of more efficient renewables and cheap natural gas have driven down market energy prices, and made incinerators less competitive. 

But it’s also because the adverse environmental impacts of incinerators have become more apparent. In fact, whether incinerators are classified as renewable energy depends what jurisdiction you’re in, with 23 U.S. states classifying them as such. 

Incineration v. landfills

Burning anything, especially a mix as varied as what we toss in the trash, sends toxins into the air. Despite advances in the toxin capture techniques that made incinerators an attractive alternative to landfills, environmental groups say the amount that escapes into the open air should concern us. “No matter how high-tech the facility is, it’s still dirty. It’s really bad for getting where we need to be in terms of waste management,” says Adrienne Perovich, associate director of the Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School.

The Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit watchdog organization, has found that waste incinerators release more mercury, lead and nitrogen oxides into the air than coal power plants to produce the same amount of energy. But Mike Van Brunt, vice president of sustainability at Covanta, says that’s not an apt comparison. “Our facilities are not built for electricity generation,” he says. “The primary purpose is to manage waste. And at the same time, we’re generating electricity to export to the grid and recovering the energy from that waste. So, it’s really about waste management.”

Incinerators also produce particulate matter (PM2.5), a poisonous air pollutant. In 2014, one facility in St. Petersburg, Florida, released almost 200,000 pounds of the stuff. And the incinerators that remain in the U.S. are an environmental justice concern: Nearly half of operating incinerators are in places where more than 25% of residents are impoverished, and more than 25% are people of color.

When you build an incinerator, you’re locked into waste generation

But landfills are no paragons of sustainability either. Stricter regulations have forced them to more effectively prevent leaks, but that doesn’t change what happens to garbage once it sits in a landfill. Landfills release an extraordinary amount of methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent in warming the earth than carbon dioxide. U.S. landfills are responsible for 15% of the nation’s methane emissions, the equivalent of 22 million cars driving for a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Incineration may release toxic chemicals, but methane isn’t one of them. And landfills, too, pose environmental justice (and odor) concerns to those who live nearby — disproportionately people of color. 

On balance, many environmentalists prefer landfills to incinerators because they give local governments more flexibility to transition toward a zero-waste future — one in which less trash is produced overall, and more trash is reused through composting or recycling.

Incinerators burn continuously from the moment they begin operations to when they close, creating a demand for waste that cannot be reused. 

“When you build an incinerator, you’re locked into waste generation,” says Monica Wilson, an associate director at the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA).

Municipalities are often contractually obligated to deliver a certain amount of waste to their incineration facility, or face a fee. Landfills lack that quota.

“It prevents us from moving forward with real zero waste and recycling because you have to maintain the incinerator with a certain amount of waste every day,” says Perovich.

For landfills, organic materials are the main culprits behind their methane problem. So composting at maximum efficiency would reduce waste-produced methane emissions by 78%, according to GAIA’s numbers.

‘You gotta put it somewhere’

Still, incinerators remain appealing in larger, denser places where land is tight, meaning there are few spaces for landfills. In the U.S., Massachusetts and Hawaii rely heavily on incineration because limited space makes landfill fees costly. Parts of Europe have also remained heavily reliant on burning trash, with the European Union countries’ municipal waste incineration doubling between 1995 and 2019. 

“There’s a profile for a community that’s able to support the infrastructure,” says Gilman. “A city on the order of half a million people, and appropriate transit opportunities.” 

In some ways, Doral, Florida, is that community. Fewer than 80,000 people live within the municipality itself, but it sits in densely populated Miami-Dade County, and the incinerator in Doral takes on much of the surrounding area’s waste. 

Since 1982, that waste-burning apparatus has stood as an uncompromising fact of life for the city, which is now some 90% residents of color. But with the company now seeking a permit for renewal, residents have made clear they are no longer willing to sustain the incinerator’s burdens. 

“Our goal is to have that incinerator shut down,” says MacKenzie Marcelin, climate justice manager of Florida Rising. The group teamed up with Earthjustice, a national organization that litigates environmental issues, to dispute the renewal. Earthjustice filed a civil rights complaint against the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to block the renewal, claiming the department insufficiently solicited public opinion from the surrounding community.

Earthjustice also stands opposed to the Florida bill, which Bradley Marshall, a senior attorney with the organization, says is “designed to prop up failing incinerators that cannot economically succeed on their own.” According to Miami-Dade County’s 2020 finance report, it spent $56 million on its incineration facility, more than twice as much as the amount allocated for its landfills, despite handling less waste.

But there’s one reason Florida proponents continue to back incinerators, and it’s not about cost or the environment. “Geography is it,” says Joe Kilsheimer, executive director of the Florida Waste-to-Energy Coalition. Landfills take up far more space than incinerators — space the state doesn’t have. In Miami-Dade County, landfills are projected to reach capacity over the next several years, with the county already sending its garbage elsewhere to buy time, and grappling with low recycling rates.  

“Waste is like a river. It’s always flowing,” says Kilsheimer. “There’s no room for the waste — and you gotta put it somewhere.”

bloomberg.com 05 23 2022