![]() Then, in 2011, after the state had issued a permit for the giant new incinerator being pushed by Energy Answers International, Gov. ![]() The intent was for Tier 2 sources, which also included hydropower, to act as a sort of “bridge fuel” and be phased out over time, said Jennifer Kunze, an advocate with Clean Water Action. When Maryland’s Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard was enacted in 2004, incineration was listed as a “Tier 2” renewable energy source. ![]() The pollutants incinerators generate also make it hard for them to comply with present-day air pollution regulations. The facilities are expensive to build and maintain, and never quite lived up to their energy-generating promise (WTE facilities produced just 0.4 percent of the electricity generated in the United States in 2015). Nearly 80 percent are located in “environmental justice” communities, meaning that they are disproportionately located near communities of color and people with higher than average rates of poverty. Most are nearing, or have surpassed, their original life expectancy. Of the 73 incinerators still in operation, just one was built in the 2000s. The profitability of incineration also got a boost when the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act passed in 1978, allowing incinerators to sell electricity to public utilities.Īs incinerators have aged, however, few have been built to take their place. Landfill methane emissions can also be virtually eliminated if people compost their food waste rather than dumping it.Įven so, a waste management hierarchy created by the Environmental Protection Agency listed “energy recovery” through incineration above throwing trash in a landfill. A quarter of the trash burned in incinerators remains as ash that still needs to be sent to a landfill. In reality, the picture is a little more complicated. The argument was that by burning waste instead of letting it slowly decompose, those methane emissions could be avoided. When organic material breaks down in landfills, it produces methane, a greenhouse gas that is many times more potent than carbon dioxide. They were conceived, in part, in response to growing consumption habits, expanding cities and the rise of plastic products, and they were touted as a more environmentally-friendly alternative to throwing trash in landfills. Most incinerators in operation today were built in the 1980s and 1990s, with a life expectancy of about 30 years. The massive, aging incinerator is also the focus of intensifying environmental opposition that aims not only to shut it down but to end what activists see as the state’s bizarre policy preference for the incineration of trash over more sustainable alternatives. Wheelabrator, still in operation, remains Baltimore’s single largest standing source of air pollution, according to an analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data by the Energy Justice Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the “grassroots energy agenda,” according to its website. In fact, the city had come to rely on an existing incineration at an existing facility called Wheelabrator Baltimore to such an extent, some environmentalists said, that residential recycling rates were significantly lower than in other parts of the country. ![]() Martin O’Malley, the Maryland legislature and a state policy that incentivized and subsidized the incineration of trash. “We knew that we had to do something.”īy the time Campbell and several classmates at Benjamin Franklin High School finished their fight, they had come up against then-Gov. “That just didn’t sit right with us as youth,” said Campbell, now 23. And the facility first proposed by Energy Answers International in 2009 was designed to incinerate 4,000 tons a day. Waste-to-energy incinerators gained traction in the 1980s, as an environmentally-friendly alternative to throwing trash in landfills by burning it and converting it to energy.īut by some metrics, burning trash can be even dirtier than burning coal, emitting lead, mercury, nitrogen oxides, dioxins and particulate matter associated with increased risk of cardiac and respiratory disease. Shashawnda Campbell became an environmental activist at 15, when she learned that a company had proposed building the country’s largest waste-to-energy incinerator less than a mile from her high school, in the Curtis Bay section of Baltimore. ![]()
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