No waste burning in Albany County, NY!

Albany Coun­ty, NY is home to many waste burn­ing threats.

Years ago, Albany City host­ed the noto­ri­ous ANSWERS trash incin­er­a­tor, a con­tro­ver­sial case of envi­ron­men­tal racism. That incin­er­a­tor has been closed since 1995. How­ev­er, the coun­ty also hosts four sewage sludge incin­er­a­tors (two still oper­at­ing, and being phased out and replaced with anaer­o­bic digesters), and the state’s only com­mer­cial haz­ardous waste incin­er­at­ing facil­i­ty, the Nor­lite light-weight aggre­gate kiln in Cohoes, NY.

On top of all of this, the coun­ty is home to Lafarge­Hol­cim, the world’s largest cement cor­po­ra­tion. Lafarge has a huge cement kiln in the Town of Coey­mans by Rave­na. A high school sits between this giant coal-burn­ing cement kiln and a huge lime­stone quarry.

In late 2017, we learned that the state of Con­necti­cut planned to replace their aging state-run trash incin­er­a­tor in Hart­ford with one of three new waste burn­ing schemes. One of the final­ists under con­sid­er­a­tion was a plan to take 50–70 towns of Con­necti­cut trash to Albany Coun­ty, NY to burn at the Lafarge cement plant for the next 30 years. We alert­ed the Albany coun­ty leg­is­la­ture, the Town of Coey­mans, the Vil­lage of Rave­na, and local res­i­dents. In the cou­ple weeks over the Decem­ber hol­i­days, a major­i­ty of each of the local gov­ern­ments came out oppos­ing the plan. Lafarge backped­dled quick­ly, and announced that they nev­er planned to do this, and would nev­er burn trash at their kiln.

How­ev­er, Lafarge then dou­bled down and insist­ed on burn­ing tires, as they do at some of their oth­er plants. The Town of Coey­mans hired us to draft a Clean Air Law, and after 1.5 years of pub­lic hear­ings and delib­er­a­tion, passed it into law in late March 2019. This effec­tive­ly blocked Lafarge’s tire burn­ing plan. How­ev­er, the three elect­ed offi­cials who passed the law were all up for elec­tion in 2019. Chal­lengers aligned with the Port of Coey­mans, which has a major con­tract with the state of New York to clean up tire piles, mas­sive­ly out­spent the elect­ed offi­cials, and swept the local elec­tions in Novem­ber 2019, tak­ing over the town. In late 2020, the all-Repub­li­can Town Board gut­ted the Coey­mans Clean Air Law to enable Lafarge to burn any waste that the state DEC or U.S. EPA allows them to burn, with­out any local reg­u­la­tion by the Town’s Clean Air Law.

Fact­sheet: Coal Burn­ing vs. Co-fir­ing Tires with Coal: Is Adding Tires more Polluting?

In Sep­tem­ber, 2020, Albany Coun­ty passed its own Albany Coun­ty Clean Air Law, out­right ban­ning large-scale waste burn­ing, but with an exemp­tion for the exist­ing haz­ardous waste burn­ing at Nor­lite. Due to a quirk of state law, the coun­ty law can­not apply with­in the Town of Coey­mans because they have their own Clean Air Law, even though it’s been gut­ted and has no effect. Had the Town repealed its law instead of strate­gi­cal­ly gut­ting it at Lafarge’s request, the coun­ty ban on waste burn­ing would apply to Lafarge.