Compost Chicken Manure, Don’t Burn It

- by Mike Ewall, Decem­ber 19, 2014, Bal­ti­more Sun 

Dan Rodricks’ recent col­umn urged the new gov­er­nor to get a large-scale poul­try waste incin­er­a­tor built on the East­ern Shore (“Lar­ry Hogan has a chance to be a green gov­er­nor,” Dec. 13). This awful idea has been float­ed for 15 years now and has gone nowhere despite an array of gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies. In that time, these incin­er­a­tors have been banned in Delaware and at least 10 pro­pos­als have been stopped through­out the U.S. (and sev­er­al more around the world). I know because my orga­ni­za­tion, Ener­gy Jus­tice Net­work, sup­port­ed most of these com­mu­ni­ties in their jus­ti­fied oppo­si­tion. One has been built in the U.S., in Min­neso­ta, and it was plagued by air pol­lu­tion vio­la­tions requir­ing expen­sive new pol­lu­tion con­trols and was lat­er caught burn­ing unau­tho­rized waste streams.

Near­ly all of these incin­er­a­tors are in the Unit­ed King­dom. Data pre­sent­ed by uni­ver­si­ty researchers in Ire­land at a bio­mass indus­try con­fer­ence a few years ago showed that diox­in pol­lu­tion from burn­ing poul­try waste was 2.6 times the legal lim­it in Europe. Diox­ins are the most tox­ic man-made chem­i­cals known to sci­ence and main­ly accu­mu­late in meat and dairy prod­ucts, includ­ing con­t­a­m­i­nat­ing poultry.

Poul­try waste burn­ing, like oth­er forms of “bio­mass” incin­er­a­tion, releas­es 50 per­cent more car­bon diox­ide than coal, cre­at­ing prob­lems for glob­al warm­ing. Releas­es of sev­er­al oth­er key pol­lu­tants would also be worse than a new coal pow­er plant, as per­mit com­par­isons have shown in North Car­oli­na. Green Plan­et Pow­er Solu­tions is cur­rent­ly being sub­si­dized by Mary­land to burn 466 tons per day of poul­try lit­ter in Som­er­set Coun­ty and is seek­ing to be exempt from pol­lu­tion con­trol require­ments usu­al­ly in place for incinerators.

There’s a rea­son why Exelon and oth­er pow­er com­pa­nies aren’t pur­su­ing build­ing these. They’re pro­hib­i­tive­ly expen­sive and can only exist with reg­u­la­to­ry exemp­tions, fed­er­al “renew­able” ener­gy tax cred­its and state sub­si­dies includ­ing pow­er pur­chase agree­ments as well as renew­able ener­gy cred­its in the state’s incin­er­a­tor-heavy “renew­able” ener­gy man­date which some are seek­ing to double.

A real green gov­er­nor would stop throw­ing pub­lic mon­ey at expen­sive and pol­lut­ing incin­er­a­tor “quick fix­es” and deal direct­ly with the prob­lem: that there is too much poul­try pro­duc­tion in one place and that the waste cur­rent­ly pro­duced can and should be han­dled with green alter­na­tives such as aer­o­bic composting.