Seneca County – Town of Romulus in Seneca Lake was threatened by a plan by Circular enerG to build a new 2,649 ton/day trash incinerator. Gas Free Seneca and Seneca Lake Guardian lead the fight to stop it. It was defeated in May 2019 upon passage of a state bill banning incineration in the Finger Lakes region.
The Hudson River Valley is also facing a large number of proposed and existing gas and waste burning projects, including:
- Warren County
- City of Glens Falls – Lehigh Cement Company wants to burn “ragger tail” (a mixture of paper and plastics) at their cement kiln. Local political opposition is mounting.
- Washington County
- Whitehall – a new waste incinerator is proposed by Enersol Technologies, Airgid Global, and Edison Energy, using plasma gasification (a type of incineration that usually doesn’t work and has not been proved at commercial scale).
- City of Hudson Falls – Wheelabrator Hudson Falls, a small 600 ton/day trash incinerator, is the county’s largest air polluter
- Albany County
- City of Cohoes – Norlite light weight aggregate kiln burns hazardous waste and is the state’s only commercial hazardous waste incinerator. They burned aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF) from the military in 2018-2019 without authorization. This firefighting foam contains toxic PFAS that doesn’t burn, spreading pollution throughout the region. In 2020, the state legislature passed a bill banning AFFF burning in Cohoes, but the fight continues against their hazardous waste burning.
- City of Albany – Albany Steam Plant planned to expand, burning more fracked gas for a local micro-grid. This was abandoned in favor of solar in September 2019.
- Town of Coeymans – LafargeHolcim cement plant has sought to burn trash, and then sought to burn tires. The Town hired us to develop a Clean Air Law in response, to ban large-scale waste burning and hold small-scale burning to more protective standards. This Clean Air Law was passed in late March 2019. Their waste-burning ambitious came to light in late 2017 when we alerted local officials to plans by the state of Connecticut to burn 50-70 towns of trash in this cement kiln. See other news coverage here, here, and here. In the November 2019 election, Republican challengers aligned with the Port of Coeymans massively outspent the Democrats running for re-election and took over the town and the county legislator seat for the area. The Port of Coeymans has a contract to take millions of tires from around the state, and it’s clear that the new elected officials would like to amend the Clean Air Law to allow tire burning at Lafarge. In response, Albany County legislators passed a county-wide Clean Air Law to back it up. However, due to a quirk in state law, the county law doesn’t apply in Coeymans so long as they have their own air or waste law. In November 2020, Coeymans Town Board gutted the law, but left the shell of it so that Lafarge could burn tires. As of late December 2020, Coeymans residents are organizing for a referendum to overturn that gutting.
- Rensselaer County
- Rensselaer – BioHiTech Global (Rensselaer Resource Recovery LLC) wants to “compost” trash and convert it to burnable fuel pellets to market as fuel to any of the five cement kilns in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley (Allentown area). Rensselaer Environmental Coalition is organizing to stop this.
- Greene County:
- Catskill – In 2019, Wheelabrator proposed a new incinerator ash dump, where ash from their incinerators in Hudson Falls, Poughkeepsie, and Peekskill would be processed and dumped in a quarry. This was abandoned after a few months of local organizing, as Wheelabrator’s parent company says they bought a small landfill company with a few landfills in the region, to use instead of a new ash monofill.
- Catskill – In late 2019, now that the Wheelabrator ash dump threat is defeated, the same property is now targeted for a construction and demolition waste landfill.
- Ulster County
- Pursuing a possible incinerator proposal in conjunction with Greene and Sullivan counties that are considering forming a joint trash authority
- “Micro-grid” fracked gas power plant proposed?
- Dutchess County:
- City of Poughkeepsie – the Dutchess County Resource Recovery Facility is a small 450 ton/day county-owned trash incinerator operated by Wheelabrator. It’s the largest air polluter in the county.
- Proposed Cricket Valley gas-fired power plant is facing opposition
- Orange County
- Montgomery – proposed Taylor Biomass trash and sewage sludge incinerator (using gasification) – authorized by NYSERDA in December 2018 to receive Tier 1 credits from state Renewable Portfolio Standard, so that it can get lucrative Renewable Energy Credit usually granted to wind and solar)
- Danskammer power plant looking to refire with fracked gas
- CPV Valley Energy Center — fracked gas power plant being built in Wawayanda
- Westchester County
- City of Peekskill – the largest of the three trash incinerators on the Hudson is the 2,250 ton/day Wheelabrator Westchester, the largest air polluter in the county
