Landfill Keeps Rhode Island Incinerator Debate Alive

- by Tim Faulkn­er, March 4, 2015, Eco RI News

The seem­ing­ly annu­al debate about build­ing a waste incin­er­a­tor in Rhode Island resolved lit­tle on the issue this year, except that any such facil­i­ty is too expen­sive and like­ly at least 10 years from ever being built.

The sole advo­cate for con­sid­er­ing an incin­er­a­tor is the oper­a­tor of the Cen­tral Land­fill in John­ston, the Rhode Island Resource Recov­ery Cor­po­ra­tion (RIRRC). The agency sim­ply wants to take a hard look at an incin­er­a­tor as it inves­ti­gates options for the state’s waste when the land­fill inevitably runs out of space.

Cur­rent­ly, state law pro­hibits RIRRC from own­ing and oper­at­ing an incin­er­a­tor and from even con­sid­er­ing it for its com­pre­hen­sive plan. A pend­ing bill would void the pro­hi­bi­tion on study­ing incin­er­a­tion. It also would remove lan­guage in the state law that says incin­er­a­tion is the most expen­sive method of waste disposal.

“Remov­ing this lan­guage is not con­sent to build,” Sarah Kite, RIRRC’s direc­tor of recy­cling ser­vices, said dur­ing a Feb. 26 State­house hear­ing. “This is not giv­ing us per­mis­sion to do any­thing oth­er than real­ly intense­ly study this issue and to bring those rec­om­men­da­tions back to this board.”

Kite admit­ted that incin­er­a­tors, also called a waste-to-ener­gy facil­i­ties, are mon­ey losers and require exten­sive envi­ron­men­tal scruti­ny. A need for one might be years away, she said, and only after RIRRC max­i­mizes its recy­cling and waste-reduc­tion efforts and the land­fill reach­es capac­i­ty for bury­ing trash — a prospect, she not­ed, that is 23 or 24 years away.

Any incin­er­a­tor, she pre­sumed, would like­ly be a small facil­i­ty that burns a mod­est vol­ume of the trash — mate­r­i­al that can’t be reused, recy­cled, repaired or composted.

“We’re not talk­ing about build­ing a mas­sive any­thing right now,” Kite said.

Oppo­nents say there is no evi­dence show­ing that incin­er­a­tors are cost effec­tive and safe. These facil­i­ties also typ­i­cal­ly require large vol­umes of waste to meet elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tion oblig­a­tions, accord­ing to opponents.

An RIRRC analy­sis from six years ago esti­mat­ed that an incin­er­a­tor in Rhode Island would cost some $400 mil­lion. To pay for it, the tip­ping fee, or the cost to cities and towns to deposit a ton of trash in the land­fill, would increase from $32 to more than $100.

Jamie Rhodes, pres­i­dent of the Envi­ron­men­tal Coun­cil of Rhode Island (ECRI), an advo­ca­cy group of more than 60 envi­ron­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions and envi­ron­men­tal­ists, said the exist­ing ban is intend­ed to send a sig­nal to poten­tial devel­op­ers and the waste indus­try that incin­er­a­tors aren’t viable.

“When (the ban) says it’s the most expen­sive form of waste man­age­ment, that’s still the case. We haven’t seen an indi­ca­tion of any­thing else,” Rhodes said.

Meg Kerr, direc­tor of Rhode Island Clean Water Action, not­ed that envi­ron­men­tal groups worked for years to pass laws that put lim­its on incin­er­a­tors — and for good rea­son. A 2011 waste study at six incin­er­a­tors in Mass­a­chu­setts revealed that 65 per­cent of the burned mate­r­i­al was recy­clable or compostable.

“Allow­ing incin­er­a­tion or begin­ning to think about it under­mines … all the efforts we’ve been doing to reduce waste,” she said.

Rhode Island has incin­er­a­tors in Cranston and Woonsock­et that burn residue from sewage treat­ment plants. Rhode Island hos­pi­tals stopped burn­ing waste in the 1990s, accord­ing to the state Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Management.

Mass­a­chu­setts has sev­en incin­er­a­tors, and Con­necti­cut has six. An incin­er­a­tor hasn’t been built in the Unit­ed States in more than 20 years, accord­ing to Kite.

Jer­ry Elmer, a senior attor­ney with the Con­ser­va­tion Law Foun­da­tion (CLF), said RIRRC shouldn’t be con­sid­er­ing an incin­er­a­tor when it is already asso­ci­at­ed with a waste-to-ener­gy facil­i­ty. The land­fill gas com­pa­ny Broad­rock Gas Ser­vices is draw­ing methane from the land­fill to fuel its 33-megawatt pow­er plant. Elmer not­ed that the facil­i­ty has repeat­ed­ly bro­ken air pol­lu­tion rules, prompt­ing CLF to file a law­suit in 2013 against Broad­rock and RIRRC for vio­lat­ing clean air regulations.

“The Gen­er­al Assem­bly has not assured that (the) land­fill can oper­ate prop­er­ly so as to avoid impacts to pub­lic health and the envi­ron­ment and yet time and again it con­sid­ers allow­ing a dif­fer­ent air pol­lu­tion gen­er­at­ing approach to land­fill man­age­ment,” Elmer wrote in a pre­pared statement.

Elmer said the bill is the fifth leg­isla­tive effort to over­turn the ban on incin­er­a­tors since the ban was approved more than 20 years ago.

The bill was held for fur­ther study.