VICTORY against Maryland’s “Waste Portfolio Standard” — the Latest Creative Way to Prop Up Incinerators

- by Mike Ewall

What does an incin­er­a­tor indus­try do when they can’t com­pete?  Change the rules.  Bio­mass and trash incin­er­a­tors are the most expen­sive way to make ener­gy, and trash incin­er­a­tion costs more than direct­ly land­fill­ing the waste.  These indus­tries sur­vive to the extent that they can change the rules to get monop­oly waste con­tracts, become ‘renew­able’ ener­gy in state man­dates, or as we’re see­ing in Mary­land: worse.

In 2011, Mary­land became the first state to change their state Renew­able Port­fo­lio Stan­dard (RPS) law — a law that man­dates “renew­able ener­gy” use — to move trash incin­er­a­tion from the dirt­i­er “Tier II” to the not-quite-as-dirty “Tier I” (where wind and solar, but also bio­mass and land­fill gas com­pete).  Many states with RPS laws have two tiers, where the cheap­er, already-built, and dirt­i­er tech­nolo­gies (usu­al­ly trash incin­er­a­tion and big old hydro­elec­tric dams) are put in a sec­ond tier menu of options where the cred­its are cheap­er, and in Mary­land’s case, where the man­date gets phased out over time.  Putting trash incin­er­a­tion in the same tier as wind pow­er cre­ates a much larg­er and grow­ing mar­ket with more valu­able cred­its.  Since this, sev­er­al oth­er states have seen pro­pos­als to do the same.

In 2013, Mary­land tried to set an ever worse prece­dent.  Cov­an­ta (the nation’s largest waste incin­er­a­tor cor­po­ra­tion) wrote a bill that gets more cre­ative: a munic­i­pal sol­id waste port­fo­lio stan­dard.  Tak­ing the notion from renew­able ener­gy laws, this law would phase in a 50% recy­cling goal, but also phase out direct land­fill­ing of waste.  By doing so, the law would cre­ate a strong incen­tive to incin­er­ate waste before bury­ing the ash.  Zero waste, as defined by the Zero Waste Inter­na­tion­al Alliance, means divert­ing as much waste as pos­si­ble (90%+) from both land­fills AND incin­er­a­tors.  How­ev­er, the incin­er­a­tor indus­try has man­aged to hijack the “zero waste” idea by push­ing this “zero waste to land­fill” rhetoric which many cities and cor­po­ra­tions are mim­ic­k­ing — which real­ly means “tox­ic ash to landfills.”

On April 8th, the Mary­land leg­is­la­ture came very close to pass­ing this awful prece­dent, but thanks to work by Com­mu­ni­ty Research, Clean Water Action, Sier­ra Club, Insti­tute for Local Self-Reliance, Ener­gy Jus­tice Net­work and 13 oth­er groups who lent their name to oppos­ing this bill, it died a qui­et death in the state House after pass­ing the state Sen­ate ear­li­er in the last day of the 2013 leg­isla­tive ses­sion.  Cov­an­ta’s lob­by­ist was fum­ing and we can now focus back on stop­ping the two large new waste incin­er­a­tors planned for the state, with­out wor­ry­ing that they’ll be propped up by yet anoth­er pro-burn state pol­i­cy.  Keep an eye out for this tac­tic in your state.