=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #114
—January 31, 1989—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
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CASE STUDY OF A GARBAGE BURNER: BOOBY TRAPS FOR POLITICIANS.
When a local government proposes to solve the garbage crisis by
building an incinerator, critics say, (1) it will be far costlier
than you’re being told by the project’s proponents; (2) the ash
will be toxic and therefore will create expensive and
liability-laden environmental problems; (3) you need to keep the
garbage flowing in to pay off the loans on the incinerator, so
you will become a garbage junkie, unable to break the habit,
unable to initiate modern programs like waste reduction or
recycling.
But the big engineering firms and their bankrollers accuse these
critics of being narrow-minded nimbies lacking technical
expertise, hysterical housewives who are anti-progress,
anti-business, anti-everything.
Politicians are caught in the middle. They may sense that these
huge projects seem reminiscent of an older, discredited way of
doing things, but they know which side their bread has always
been buttered on; it seems dangerous to oppose what the big boys
are proposing. So a whole generation of local politicians has
staked its reputation (and its retirement benefits) on building
garbage incinerators.
The first garbage incinerator in New Jersey came on line last
July with great fanfare. Officials trumpeted to the media that
this was the wave of the future, the solution to the state’s
mountainous trash woes. Sixteen other garbage burners are now in
the pipeline in New Jersey, steadily abuilding. The only one that
has come on line is in rural Warren county, and its story should
be a lesson to local politicians everywhere: be careful before
you buy one of these expensive machines–they really are more
trouble than you’re being told.
Set amid corn fields and woodlands 40 miles west of Newark, NJ,
the Warren county plant is losing $12,000 a day every day it
operates. It has run up a deficit of $1.5 million during its
first 6 months of operation. The plant cost $52 million to build
and it’s supposed to burn 2200 tons of garbage each week (400
tons per day), but in reality it’s only processing 1600 tons per
week, 27% below expectations. The firm that built it, owns it,
and operates it under contract to the county, Blount Engineering
of Montgomerey, Alabama, agreed to charge the county “only” $98
per ton but that was based on 2200 tons per week. (Blount turns
some of the trash into steam, then into electricity, and sells
the electricity at a profit. This is how they can afford to
charge “only” $98 per ton for the garbage.) With fewer tons
coming into the plant, the county will have to pay Blount
more–up to $135 per ton. The county doesn’t have that kind of
money, so now officials are scrambling to find more garbage to
bring into the county, to meet their obligations to Blount.
Warren county has become a garbage junkie–desperately seeking
ways to import garbage, to keep up the payments on its expensive
machine. Warren officials are negotiating now with nearby
Hunterdon county, wooing that county’s trash.
It is important to bring in more trash because the
alternative–making cash payments to Blount instead of giving
them the required 2200 tons of trash week–will drive up the
price per ton that the people of Warren county have to pay to get
rid of their garbage. If the price rises much above $98 per ton,
the whole project could collapse because it won’t be able to
compete with other ways of handling the county’s trash. (To try
to make sure the economics looked good, New Jersey passed a law
making it illegal for Warren residents to send their trash
anywhere outside the county. But competition from composters and
recyclers inside the county could drive the incinerator over a
cliff.)
Warren officials are blaming their trash shortage the state’s
mandatory recycling law, which has just begun to take effect. The
state’s law only requires 25% recycling and it hasn’t achieved
anything close to that yet–but it has already become clear that
even a little recycling is devastating to the economics of an
incinerator. If New Jersey ever got really serious and achieved
over 70% recycling, which seems to be possible to do (see RHWN #108), the
state’s 16 incinerators would all turn into fabulously
expensive white elephants. This means that politicians who are
pushing these projects will have to take a stand against
recycling–thus committing themselves to resisting the tidal wave
of recycling now sweeping the country.
The Warren incinerator has run into other unexpected problems.
The 480 tons per week of ash left over from burning Warren’s
garbage actually has tested toxic 45% of the time, and the
incinerator was built on the assumption that it would produce
toxic ash only 30% of the time. When the ash tests toxic, it
can’t be shipped to a dump in Pennsylvania for $60 per ton, but
must be shipped to the Model Cities hazardous waste landfill
(operated by Chemical Waste Management, Inc.) in Niagara County,
New York, where the cost of disposal is $250 per ton.
Warren officials have now started to search for the source of the
toxic metals (cadmium and lead) that are playing havoc with their
ash. However, they admit it’s like “looking for a needle in a
haystack,” says Bart Carhart, executive director of Warren
county’s pollution control financing authority. Mr. Carhart says
he hopes they can find the cadmium source without having to cut
off all industrial trash coming into the incinerator. Cutting off
the industrial trash flow would make the project’s financial
picture even bleeker.
Politicians must understand that these incinerators are not a bad
deal for everyone–they’re only bad for taxpayers and for
politicians. Incinerators make good sense from the viewpoint of
companies like Blount Engineering. They build the plant with
other people’s (taxpayers’) money, so they’re taking no financial
risk. They have a contract that says the local government must
“put or pay”–put sufficient garbage into the furnace to make it
run profitably, or pay the difference in cash. If the ash tests
toxic, local government has to pay the added expense, not Blount.
When the whole thing sags because of citizen pressure to start
recycling programs, or pressure from environmentalists to tighten
the lax definition of ash toxicity, Blount won’t fare any worse.
Even if the whole project goes bust, Blount has already made most
of its money–the big profits were in the construction of the
machine itself. And after all, no Blount official ever has to
stand for election; it’s local politicians who will take the
heat while local taxpayers pick up the tab. Blount will be long
gone, wooing other politicians in other towns, selling blue sky
solutions to our brown and earthy problems.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: incineration; warren county, nj; ash; cadmium;
lead; hazardous waste; landfilling; blount engineering; al;
recycling;