Albany County, NY is home to many waste burning threats.
Years ago, Albany City hosted the notorious ANSWERS trash incinerator, a controversial case of environmental racism. That incinerator has been closed since 1995. However, the county also hosts four sewage sludge incinerators (two still operating, and being phased out and replaced with anaerobic digesters), and the state’s only commercial hazardous waste incinerating facility, the Norlite light-weight aggregate kiln in Cohoes, NY.
On top of all of this, the county is home to LafargeHolcim, the world’s largest cement corporation. Lafarge has a huge cement kiln in the Town of Coeymans by Ravena. A high school sits between this giant coal-burning cement kiln and a huge limestone quarry.
In late 2017, we learned that the state of Connecticut planned to replace their aging state-run trash incinerator in Hartford with one of three new waste burning schemes. One of the finalists under consideration was a plan to take 50–70 towns of Connecticut trash to Albany County, NY to burn at the Lafarge cement plant for the next 30 years. We alerted the Albany county legislature, the Town of Coeymans, the Village of Ravena, and local residents. In the couple weeks over the December holidays, a majority of each of the local governments came out opposing the plan. Lafarge backpeddled quickly, and announced that they never planned to do this, and would never burn trash at their kiln.
However, Lafarge then doubled down and insisted on burning tires, as they do at some of their other plants. The Town of Coeymans hired us to draft a Clean Air Law, and after 1.5 years of public hearings and deliberation, passed it into law in late March 2019. This effectively blocked Lafarge’s tire burning plan. However, the three elected officials who passed the law were all up for election in 2019. Challengers aligned with the Port of Coeymans, which has a major contract with the state of New York to clean up tire piles, massively outspent the elected officials, and swept the local elections in November 2019, taking over the town. In late 2020, the all-Republican Town Board gutted the Coeymans Clean Air Law to enable Lafarge to burn any waste that the state DEC or U.S. EPA allows them to burn, without any local regulation by the Town’s Clean Air Law.
Factsheet: Coal Burning vs. Co-firing Tires with Coal: Is Adding Tires more Polluting?
In September, 2020, Albany County passed its own Albany County Clean Air Law, outright banning large-scale waste burning, but with an exemption for the existing hazardous waste burning at Norlite. Due to a quirk of state law, the county law cannot apply within the Town of Coeymans because they have their own Clean Air Law, even though it’s been gutted and has no effect. Had the Town repealed its law instead of strategically gutting it at Lafarge’s request, the county ban on waste burning would apply to Lafarge.
