Maryland “Zero-Waste” Plan Draws Fire Over Inclusion of Incineration

- by Tim­o­thy B. Wheel­er, Decem­ber 15, 2014, The Bal­ti­more Sun

With Mary­lan­ders throw­ing away far more trash per per­son than the aver­age Amer­i­can, the O’Mal­ley admin­is­tra­tion released a long-range plan Mon­day to vir­tu­al­ly elim­i­nate plac­ing waste in state land­fills in the next 25 years. The plan is draw­ing mixed reac­tion, how­ev­er, as envi­ron­men­tal­ists crit­i­cize the blue­print­’s embrace of burn­ing debris to gen­er­ate energy.

State offi­cials say that cur­tail­ing plac­ing waste in land­fills can save com­mu­ni­ties and tax­pay­ers mon­ey, con­serve ener­gy and nat­ur­al resources, and reduce pol­lu­tion, includ­ing the release of cli­mate-warm­ing green­house gases.

Mary­lan­ders have more than dou­bled their recy­cling rates in the past two decades, the plan notes, now divert­ing about 45 per­cent of what once was thrown away. How­ev­er, the state’s res­i­dents still dis­card more than half their waste, with most of that going to land­fills, accord­ing to the Mary­land Depart­ment of the Environment.

In a state­ment accom­pa­ny­ing the plan’s release, Gov. Mar­tin O’Mal­ley called it “an ambi­tious pol­i­cy frame­work to cre­ate green jobs and busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties while vir­tu­al­ly doing away with the inef­fi­cient waste dis­pos­al prac­tices that threat­en our future.”

The plan pro­duced by the envi­ron­ment depart­ment lays out near­ly 60 options for achiev­ing “zero waste” by 2040, which in real­i­ty means divert­ing 85 per­cent of what gets buried in land­fills now.

It sets as its top pri­or­i­ty a series of reforms in the way prod­ucts are designed and con­sumed so there’s less waste gen­er­at­ed in the first place. It also pro­pos­es mea­sures to increase recy­cling, includ­ing vast­ly expand­ed com­post­ing of kitchen-table food scraps, reuse of treat­ed waste­water, and vol­ume-based, “pay-as-you-throw” trash col­lec­tion fees designed to give res­i­dents a finan­cial incen­tive to reduce their dis­cards. Final­ly, the plan calls for burn­ing waste that can’t be pre­vent­ed or recy­cled to gen­er­ate energy.

A pub­lic forum on the zero-waste plan is to be held from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tues­day at the Bal­ti­more head­quar­ters of the state Depart­ment of the Envi­ron­ment, 1800 Wash­ing­ton Blvd. A draft plan released last spring drew more than 115 writ­ten com­ments and prompt­ed state offi­cials to hold three meet­ings to review it over the summer.

Exe­cu­tion of the pro­pos­als in the plan would come through leg­is­la­tion, reg­u­la­tions and vol­un­tary incen­tives, among oth­er methods.

The Mary­land Pub­lic Inter­est Research Group released a state­ment call­ing the final plan “a big step in the right direc­tion,” includ­ing its pro­pos­als for expand­ed recy­cling. One of the options draw­ing par­tic­u­lar praise would pro­mote reuse of drink bot­tles and oth­er bev­er­age con­tain­ers by levy­ing a refund­able deposit on them when they’re sold. Sim­i­lar “bot­tle bills” have been pro­posed and killed in Annapo­lis by oppo­si­tion from retail­ers and bev­er­age manufacturers.

Emi­ly Scarr, the group’s direc­tor, crit­i­cized the plan, though, for includ­ing the burn­ing of trash to gen­er­ate energy.

“Incin­er­a­tors are expen­sive,” she said, “and they dis­cour­age waste reduc­tion and recy­cling because the busi­ness mod­el requires a con­stant flow of waste, which works direct­ly against efforts to reduce, reuse, recy­cle, and compost.”

She argued that zero waste can be reached sole­ly by reduc­ing what’s dis­card­ed, reusing as much as pos­si­ble and recy­cling the rest.

“This is not a Zero Waste Plan by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion,” said Car­o­line Ead­er, a Fred­er­ick res­i­dent who’s fought a pro­posed waste-to-ener­gy incin­er­a­tor in her county.