Florida: Trash Incineration Capital of the United States

Flori­da burns more trash than any state in the Unit­ed States. Flori­da used to have the great­est num­ber of trash incin­er­a­tors in any US state until the 2021 clo­sure of the Bay Coun­ty incin­er­a­tor and the 2023 clo­sure of the Mia­mi-Dade incin­er­a­tor in Doral fol­low­ing a three-week fire. There are now nine trash incin­er­a­tors remain­ing in Flori­da at eight sites, sec­ond only to New York which still has ten incin­er­a­tors oper­at­ing. Flori­da still burns more trash than any oth­er state, though, because Flori­da’s incin­er­a­tors are larg­er than New York’s.

Incin­er­a­tion is the most expen­sive and pol­lut­ing way to man­age waste or to make ener­gy. It’s dirt­i­er than burn­ing coal, and worse than land­fill­ing waste direct­ly. For South Flori­da’s urban areas, it would make more eco­nom­ic and envi­ron­men­tal sense to ship waste north to land­fills than to sup­port aging and pol­lut­ing incin­er­a­tors and dump their tox­ic ash in landfills. 

In 2022, the leg­is­la­ture passed and Gov­er­nor DeSan­tis signed Sen­ate Bill 1764 in law, which throws hun­dreds of mil­lions of Flori­da tax­pay­er dol­lars at the state’s trash incin­er­a­tors, first prop­ping them up by cov­er­ing reduced elec­tric­i­ty sales rev­enues, then grant­i­ng the rest in sub­si­dies to build new incin­er­a­tors and expand exist­ing ones, as Cov­an­ta is try­ing to do at their Pas­co Coun­ty incinerator. 

Ini­tial­ly writ­ten to allo­cate $100 mil­lion dol­lars a year for this pur­pose, the dol­lar amount was replaced with match­ing funds to build new incin­er­a­tors or expand exist­ing ones — a blank check that could amount to far more than $100 mil­lion a year. On March 1st, 2022, the for­mer Chief of Staff at the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency under the Trump Admin­is­tra­tion wrote a pow­er­ful arti­cle in the Florid­i­an blast­ing these bills as a step back­wards, under­min­ing the state’s recy­cling goals.

Florida stands out in several ways

• In Feb­ru­ary 2023, the trash incin­er­a­tor in the City of Doral in Mia­mi-Dade Coun­ty burned uncon­trolled for three weeks, shut­ting the plant down and spread­ing a huge plume of air pol­lu­tion into the com­mu­ni­ty. This is only unusu­al because oth­er fires at Cov­an­ta incin­er­a­tors (includ­ing two in the DC area in late 2016, ear­ly 2017) have usu­al­ly not last­ed more than two weeks.
• In 2023, Broward and Mia­mi-Dade Coun­ties are pur­su­ing build­ing large new incin­er­a­tors — just sev­en miles from each oth­er, on the edge of the Ever­glades. This is high­ly unusu­al, as incin­er­a­tors are rarely pro­posed these days, and none have suc­cess­ful­ly been built at a new site since 1995 despite hun­dreds of attempts.
• West Palm Beach has two incin­er­a­tors adja­cent to one anoth­er. One is the only new trash incin­er­a­tor built in the U.S. since 1995 (not count­ing a small num­ber of expan­sions where one boil­er has been added to some oth­er incin­er­a­tors). This new incin­er­a­tor cost $672 mil­lion to build — six times more expen­sive than a new gas-fired pow­er plant, accord­ing to the Flori­da Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture and Con­sumer Ser­vices (see foot­note 4 on page 24 of this sec­tion of the meet­ing pack­et on the sen­ate bill).
• The Pas­co Coun­ty incin­er­a­tor is the only incin­er­a­tor in the U.S. cur­rent­ly propos­ing to expand. A fourth boil­er is being pur­sued at that facility.
• Cov­an­ta Lake is one of three trash incin­er­a­tors in the nation burn­ing med­ical waste. It does so with­out being sub­ject to the stricter emis­sions require­ments that apply to med­ical waste incinerators.
• 70% of Flori­da’s incin­er­a­tors are locat­ed where peo­ple of col­or are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly impact­ed. Read more about incin­er­a­tors and envi­ron­men­tal racism.

Trash Incinerators in Florida

Click on map for an inter­ac­tive map

Coun­ty	Facil­i­ty	Oper­a­tor *	Year Opened	Trash burn­ing capac­i­ty (tons/day)	# of Burners	Elec­tric­i­ty (MW)	Pop­u­la­tion with­in 2.5 miles		Notes
							Peo­ple of color	House­hold income
Broward	Whee­labra­tor South Broward, Inc.	Whee­labra­tor	1991	2,250	3	66	46.0%	$54,000	Elec­tric sales con­tract with FPL expires 12/2026; Pri­vate­ly owned
Hills­bor­ough	Hills­bor­ough Coun­ty Resource Recov­ery Facility	Cov­an­ta	1987 (units 1–3); 2009 (unit 4)	1,800	4	47	58.1%	$44,000
Hills­bor­ough	McK­ay Bay Refuse-to-Ener­gy Facility	Whee­labra­tor	1985	1,000	4	22	68.1%	$42,000
Lake	Lake Coun­ty Resource Recov­ery Facility	Cov­an­ta	1990	528	2	15	5.2%	$50,000	Burns up to 8% med­ical waste; Pri­vate­ly owned
Lee	Lee Coun­ty Resource Recov­ery Facility	Cov­an­ta	1994 (units 1–2), 2007 (unit 3)	1,836	3	57	50.7%	$51,000
Mia­mi-Dade	Mia­mi-Dade Coun­ty Resource Recov­ery Facility	Cov­an­ta	1982	2,592	4	77	85.4%	$77,000	Burns refuse derived fuel (processed trash)
Palm Beach	Palm Beach Renew­able Ener­gy Facil­i­ty 1	Cov­an­ta	1989	2,000	2	61	63.2%	$60,000	Elec­tric sales con­tract with FPL expires 3/2034; burns refuse derived fuel (processed trash)
Palm Beach	Palm Beach Renew­able Ener­gy Facil­i­ty 2	Cov­an­ta	2015	3,000	3	96	63.2%	$60,000	Elec­tric sales con­tract with FPL expires 3/2034. This new incin­er­a­tor took $672 mil­lion to build.
Pas­co	Pas­co Coun­ty Resource Recov­ery Facility	Cov­an­ta	1991	1,050	3	30	13.0%	$65,000	Elec­tric sales con­tract with Duke expires 12/2024; 4th burn­er planned
Pinel­las	Pinel­las Coun­ty Resource Recov­ery Facility	Cov­an­ta	1983 (units 1–2); 1986 (unit 3)	3,150	3	75	21.9%	$50,000	Elec­tric sales con­tract with Duke expires 12/2024

Florida’s mercury problem

From 2011–2020, Flori­da’s trash incin­er­a­tors are respon­si­ble for 1/3rd of the indus­tri­al air emis­sions of high­ly tox­ic mer­cury in the state, accord­ing to data report­ed by indus­tri­al facil­i­ties to Flori­da’s Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion. There is no safe dose of mer­cury. The Flori­da Depart­ment of Health has over 2,000 fish con­sump­tion advi­sories warn­ing about the safe­ty risk of con­sum­ing var­i­ous species of fish in water bod­ies in through­out the state. There are warn­ings in every Flori­da coun­ty. See sortable spread­sheet of Flori­da fish con­sump­tion advisories. 

Mer­cury is the rea­son for 98.6% of these advi­sories, and some of the remain­ing advi­sories are also due to pol­lu­tants released from trash incin­er­a­tors, such as diox­in, lead, and arsenic. 

38% of the mer­cury emit­ted from Flori­da indus­try from 2011–2020 was from the state’s trash incin­er­a­tors. Two are now closed, but one new one opened in 2015. Cov­an­ta Pinel­las (the largest in the state and sec­ond largest in the nation) is respon­si­ble for the vast major­i­ty of the indus­try’s mer­cury emis­sions in Flori­da. If you pre­tend that the two incin­er­a­tors that are now closed (Whee­labra­tor North Broward and Bay Coun­ty) nev­er exist­ed, the indus­try is respon­si­ble for 34% of the state’s mer­cury emis­sions. Incin­er­a­tors are in red in the chart below.

Coun­ty	Name	Total mer­cury emis­sions in pounds (2011–2020)
Duval	CMC Steel Florida	1,284
Pinel­las	Pinel­las County	998
Sumter	Sumter­ville Cement Plant	561
Put­nam	Semi­nole Gen­er­at­ing Station	418
Suwan­nee	Bran­ford Cement Plant	381
Hills­bor­ough	Hills­bor­ough	354
Orange	Stan­ton Ener­gy Center	346
Broward	Whee­labra­tor North Broward [closed in 2015]	257
Broward	Whee­labra­tor South Broward	159
Nas­sau	Fer­nan­d­i­na Beach Mill	136
Lee	Lee Coun­ty	116
Bay	Bay Coun­ty Waste-to-Ener­gy [closed in 2021]	111
Pas­co	Pas­co County	111
Hendry	U.S. Sug­ar Clewis­ton Facility	110
Palm Beach	West Palm Beach #1 & 2	103
Lake	Lake Coun­ty	102
Nas­sau	Ray­onier Fer­nan­d­i­na Sul­fite Plant	99
Polk	Polk Pow­er Station	90
Lee	East Water Recla­ma­tion Facility	79
Palm Beach	Glades Sug­ar House	74
Mia­mi-Dade	Mia­mi-Dade County	72
Duval	Jack­sonville Facility	59
Palm Beach	Okee­lan­ta Cogen­er­a­tion Plant	47
Palm Beach	Osce­o­la Farms	42
Pinel­las	City Of Largo Waste­water Treat­ment Plant	38
Hills­bor­ough	McK­ay Bay	36
Pinel­las	South Cross Bay­ou AWRF	28
Polk	C.D. Mcin­tosh, Jr. Pow­er Plant	25
Tay­lor	Foley Mill	18
Duval	Jack­sonville Mill	17
Escam­bia	Inter­na­tion­al Paper Pen­saco­la Mill	17
Orange	Ster­i­cy­cle — Apopka	15
[Mul­ti­ple]	[24 oth­er facil­i­ties with under 10 pounds each]	29
TOTAL		6,334
TOTAL FROM TRASH INCINERATORS		2,419

What is the alternative to incineration?

Incin­er­a­tion does not avoid land­fills. Incin­er­a­tion cre­ates 30 tons of tox­ic ash for every 100 tons of waste burned. The remain­ing 70 tons end up in the air, includ­ing sig­nif­i­cant amounts of air pol­lu­tion. Ash makes land­fills more tox­ic and dan­ger­ous to ground­wa­ter. It’s less harm­ful to use land­fills direct­ly while imple­ment­ing gen­uine waste reduc­tion, reuse, recy­cling, and com­post­ing mea­sures to stretch out the life of the state’s landfills. 

There are sev­er­al pri­vate­ly-owned land­fills in cen­tral Flori­da that could serve the needs of south Flori­da’s incin­er­a­tor com­mu­ni­ties with­out exces­sive haul­ing dis­tances. Most can be han­dled with­in a 50–100 mile truck­ing dis­tance, and some might have to go as far as 150–200 miles, which is not unusu­al com­pared to oth­er parts of the coun­try. Even at a truck­ing dis­tance of hun­dreds of miles, the emis­sions from truck­ing do not jus­ti­fy incin­er­at­ing clos­er to home. Truck­ing emis­sions are tiny com­pared to the emis­sions of land­fills and incin­er­a­tors them­selves, and incin­er­a­tion is so much more pol­lut­ing than land­fill­ing that life cycle analy­sis has shown that it’s far less harm­ful to truck to dis­tant land­fills than to burn near­by and bury ash in land­fills. See pages 56–58 and 63–67 in the Beyond Incin­er­a­tion report for results of a study on this. 

Flori­da’s oper­at­ing land­fills are here:

Find EPA’s Excel spread­sheet of oper­at­ing and closed land­fills in Flori­da here.