trash

- January 6, 2015, LocalSYR

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"375","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 222px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]It’s the next step to allow trash from Cortland County to be brought into Onondaga County’s Waste to Energy facility.

Both counties’ legislatures this week have held public hearings on the so called “Ash for Trash” plan.

For two decades now Onondaga County's Waste to Energy facility has been burning trash only from Onondaga County.

The legislature is now considering changing that law to allow for trash to come in from Cortland County.

The the extra trash would allow the incinerator to meet the minimum levels of trash it handles as established in a new contract agreed to between OCRRA and the plant operator, Covanta.

- by Bill Cummings, December 28, 2014, CT Post

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"368","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 250px; height: 188px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]The discovery of PCBs and other contaminants at Greenwich High School two years ago is only part of a mosaic of cancer-causing toxics that have cropped up at various sites around one of the nation's wealthiest, most exclusive communities.

Pollutants have now been confirmed at three other locations in Greenwich, providing new and expanding evidence of a decades-old trail of ash stretching from the high school to the west, down along both sides of the Interstate 95 corridor and directly into Long Island Sound.

Recent soil tests near an old pool at waterfront Byram Park that the town wants to replace revealed arsenic concentrations at 11 times the acceptable residential standard and the presence of an "ash type material."

- by Timothy B. Wheeler, December 15, 2014, The Baltimore Sun

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"357","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 325px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]With Marylanders throwing away far more trash per person than the average American, the O'Malley administration released a long-range plan Monday to virtually eliminate placing waste in state landfills in the next 25 years. The plan is drawing mixed reaction, however, as environmentalists criticize the blueprint's embrace of burning debris to generate energy.

State officials say that curtailing placing waste in landfills can save communities and taxpayers money, conserve energy and natural resources, and reduce pollution, including the release of climate-warming greenhouse gases.

Marylanders have more than doubled their recycling rates in the past two decades, the plan notes, now diverting about 45 percent of what once was thrown away. However, the state's residents still discard more than half their waste, with most of that going to landfills, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment.

In a statement accompanying the plan's release, Gov. Martin O'Malley called it "an ambitious policy framework to create green jobs and business opportunities while virtually doing away with the inefficient waste disposal practices that threaten our future."

- by Brittany Wallman, December 9, 2014, Sun Sentinel

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"340","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"139","style":"width: 362px; height: 139px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"362"}}]]Neighbors of the "Mount Trashmore'' landfill in northern Broward descended on County Hall Tuesday, worried about plans to close a trash-burning incinerator in the region.

Hundreds piled into County Commission chambers, some having arrived on a bus from the Wynmoor Village senior condo coummunity in Coconut Creek. City officials and residents there fear the displaced trash could end up heaped upon the landfill, officially named Monarch Hill but long dubbed Mount Trashmore by locals.

Waste Management's Wheelabrator Technologies Inc. wants Broward County Commission approval to stop using the northern trash-to-energy plant. Under the proposal, the garbage would rumble south in trucks through the heart of the county to an incinerator on U.S. 441, north of Griffin Road.

- by Bobby Zipp, November 20, 2014,  Swarthmore Phoenix

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"311","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 189px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]Two weeks ago, a group of the Green Advisors conducted a waste audit of Kohlberg Hall and the Science Center. The purpose of the annual audit is to create a visual representation of the amount of waste produced by those buildings and test how well the Swarthmore community knows what to compost, recycle and put in the trash. Spearheaded by Green Advisor coordinators Kelley Langhans ’16,  Indy Reid-Shaw ’17 and Laura Laderman ’18, a team of GAs spent a day sorting through the 347 pounds of waste that was produced by Kohlberg and the Science Center on a single day and recorded the amount of waste in each of the three categories that was incorrectly disposed of. They found that out of everything that had been placed in trash bins, 35.3 percent of it was actually trash, and the rest could have been composted or recycled. Trash at Swarthmore is burned at Covanta Waste facility in Chester, the largest energy-from-waste incinerator in the country, which is located about eight miles away from the college.

- by Grady Trimble,  October 24, 2014, WLBZ

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"298","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 210px; float: left; margin: 3px 10px;"}}]]A team of University of Maine researchers are gearing up to study the possibility of bringing new technology called "Trashanol" to Maine.

"Trashanol" is a waste-to-energy technology developed by Maryland-based company Fiberight. Basically, it is a process that converts household waste into fuel.

The technology is sparking interest in Eastern Maine, because pretty soon, nearly 200 towns in the region will face substantially higher costs to dispose of their trash at the PERC plant in Orrington. The long term contracts for those towns is up in 2018, and they are all expecting PERC will drastically increase their fees.

Those towns, which are represented by the Municipal Review Committee, or MRC, hired UMaine researchers to explore "Trashanol" as an alternative. While the deal hasn't been finalized yet, MRC will spend $20,000 for the research. Dr. Hemant Pendse with UMaine's Forest Biodproducts Research Institute will lead it.

- by Jarrel Wade, August 6, 2014, Tulsa World

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"241","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 320px; height: 211px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: waste-management-world.com"}}]]Trash board members voted Tuesday to begin the process of seeking bids for contractors to pick up curbside green waste and take it to the city’s burn plant.

The recently introduced plan from the Tulsa Authority for Recovery of Energy is to send green waste to the city’s burn plant permanently, essentially ending Tulsa’s curbside green-waste program as it was originally promised.

The TARE board vote authorizes staff to invite bids from contractors for board evaluation and possible acceptance at future meetings.

The vote followed discussion about several contractual obligations that hindered implementation of the new plan.

TARE officials have said their goals are to keep costs low, keep the system environmentally responsible and make the trash system simple for customers.

One problem is that the city would be forced to continue requiring that green waste be put in clear plastic bags even though it likely would go in the same trucks to the same location as trash.

The contract with the city’s haulers, NeWSolutions, requires that green waste be in a separate waste stream, TARE attorney Stephen Schuller said.

“Competitive bidders could bring a lawsuit on such a fundamental change,” he said.

Another problem discussed was TARE’s inability to seek bids for contractors to take the green waste to the city’s green-waste facility, which some board members had requested for price comparison.

Schuller said a contract between the board and the burn plant mandates that all green waste — if taken by a TARE contractor — go to the burn plant, owned by Covanta Energy.

- Kathleen McLaughlin, August 4, 2014, Indianapolis Business Journal

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"240","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 222px; height: 148px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: Indianapolis Business Journal"}}]]The city of Indianapolis faces financial penalties if it launches alternative recycling programs, under a pending deal with incinerator operator Covanta.

The Indianapolis Board of Public Works will vote Wednesday on an agreement that’s worth more than $112 million in revenue to Covanta, which would become the city’s main residential recycling provider for the next 14 years.

Covanta is proposing to build a $45 million recycling facility next to its incinerator on Harding Street. Under the deal negotiated by Republican Mayor Greg Ballard's administration, the city would continue to send all household waste to Covanta, but the company would pluck out recyclables and sell them on the commodities market.

Companies that rely on recycled goods oppose the deal because they say Covanta’s facility would generate sub-par material for their industries. But the Department of Public Works says it’s a way to boost the city’s overall recycling rate without requiring residents to sign up for a separate curbside service.

Curbside recycling is currently available for an additional monthly fee through Republic Services, but participation is low.

Democrats on the City-County Council want the city to pursue other alternatives, but that would be impossible under terms of the Covanta deal, which were made available to the Board of Public Works on Friday.

UPDATE: despite strong organizing efforts, an outpouring of community opposition and strong research we've compiled to show how awful this plan is, city council voted unanimously on Aug 13th to approve Covanta's plan that allows 30 years of New York City waste to be brought by train to Chester for incineration.  In fact, it'll go through Chester to Wilmington, DE, then will be trucked back into Chester, with five more trucks than they'd normally need since rail boxes are smaller than normal trucks.  It's an insane plan and we'll continue to fight it.  See Chester Environmental Justice for details.

-  by Vince Sullivan, July 24, 2014, Delaware County Daily Times

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"237","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"272","style":"width: 255px; height: 145px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: LancasterOnline.com","width":"480"}}]]Dozens of city residents attended Wednesday night’s council meeting to voice their opposition to a proposal that would allow the country’s largest trash incinerator to construct additional buildings on its property.

Covanta’s Delaware Valley Resource Recovery Facility, located in the first block of Highland Avenue, is seeking to construct a 16,000-square-foot building that would enable the facility to handle a different kind of truck traffic. The company recently entered into a 20-year contract with New York City to incinerate up to 500,000 tons of municipal waste each year. The waste would be brought from New York to Wilmington, Del., via train and then the rail boxes would be put onto tractor-trailers to be trucked to Chester.

A Covanta vice president attended two planning commission meetings where he explained that the incinerator is not seeking to increase its trash-burning capacity, which is regulated by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, but said the trash from New York would replace other municipal waste sources. He added that because more trash wouldn’t be coming into the facility, the number of trucks driving to the incinerator would not increase. The rail box building would enable the boxes to be removed from the trucks and emptied onto the tipping floor.

The proposal also calls for a 1,000-square-foot office building. The Chester City Planning Comission recommended that city council deny the application.

- by Mike Ewall, Energy Justice Network

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"60","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 377px; height: 399px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;"}}]]VICTORY!!  For a second year in a row, pro-incinerator legislation in Maryland was defeated.  This stealthy legislation was written by Covanta (the nation's largest trash incineration company) and would put Maryland on the path to burning nearly all of the waste that isn't recycled. 

The legislation takes the Renewable Portfolio Standard concept (which mandates a phase-in of renewable energy) and applies it to municipal solid waste (trash).  Without even mentioning incineration, this "Recycling and Landfill Diversion Portfolio Standard" would move the state toward increased recycling, but require that the remainder be diverted from direct dumping in landfills. Rather than move away from both landfills and incinerators, the bill would create the market for burning nearly all of the non-recycled waste in the state, before dumping the ash in landfills. This fits with efforts by many corporations and cities to hijack the concept of "zero waste" to make it mean "zero waste to landfill"— pushing incineration and pretending that the ash isn't then dumped in landfills.

In 2011, Maryland was the first state to bump trash incineration into Tier I of their Renewable Portfolio Standard, putting it in competition with wind power. This awful idea, pioneered in Maryland, is now being pushed in several other states. Please look out in your state for these covert attempts to promote incineration in the guise of recycling and "landfill diversion."

This bill in Maryland passed the Maryland House, but was stopped in the Senate when their Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee voted unanimously (11 to zero) to reject the bill. See www.energyjustice.net/md/ for more information on this and other pro-incineration bills we worked to stop (all of which are dead for this year).

Many thanks to all who helped stop this misguided legislation, most especially Greg Smith of Community Research and the following organizations: Assateague Coastal Trust, Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility, Clean Water Action, Community Research, Crabshell Alliance, Energy Justice Network, Food & Water Watch, Free Your Voice, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, No Incinerator Alliance, Sierra Club, United Workers, Waste Not! Carroll, Wicomico Environmental Trust, and Zero Waste Prince George's.