The Covanta plant in Newark has operated since 1990. They take in 2,800 tons of waste from 22 municipalities in Essex County as well as New York City. The garbage is burned and then converted into energy. The company says burning trash is a better alternative to dumping garbage in a landfill that produces methane. (Karen Yi | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)
By Michael Sol Warren | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Scattered across New Jersey, four looming incinerators spend day and night torching our trash.
The facilities receive tons of waste from homes and businesses each day, burn it all, then recycle the metal that’s left behind and sell the electricity generated in the process to power thousands of homes.
It’s a model that incinerator companies have held up as a cleaner alternative to simply dumping trash in methane-belching landfills. But many Garden State residents living in their shadow, often in places plagued by dirty air, have long seen incinerators as a threat to their health. Organizations advocating for these communities have for years railed against the incinerators and pushed for their closures.
Now, a newly-released catalog of pollution and violations associated with those incinerators, plus information about subsidies provided to the facilities, has opened a new chapter in the controversy.
A new report published Wednesday by a coalition of environmental groups details the scope of collective pollution from New Jersey’s four active incinerators, plus one that was retired less than two years ago.
The report also highlights millions of dollars worth of subsidies paid to the incinerators by electric customers, and questions whether such payment was legal.
The findings are presented by Earthjustice, the Vermont Law School Environmental Advocacy Clinic, the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance and the Newark-based Ironbound Community Corporation. The information matches much of what the groups sent in a letter to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities last April. That letter was first reported by Politico.
The two companies that operate New Jersey’s incinerators, Morristown-based Covanta and New Hampshire-based Wheelabrator Technologies, blasted the new report as anti-industry misinformation and defended their environmental records to NJ Advance Media.
Major sources of dirty air
The report focuses on four incinerators currently operating in the state — three facilities run by Covanta in Newark, Camden and Rahway, and another run by Wheelabrator in Gloucester County — plus the former Covanta facility in Warren County that closed in 2019.
Those five incinerators, according to the report, consistently ranked among the largest sources of air pollution in New Jersey between 2015 and 2018, when compared to all 215 facilities with major air permits in in the state — places like factories and power plants.
That pollution is compounded by the incinerators’ proximity to other major industrial facilities, leaving nearby communities to breathe air dirtied by the cumulative effects. The Newark incinerator, for example, is on the edge of the city’s Ironbound neighborhood and near to factories, tank farms, a natural gas power plant and a sewage treatment facility.
“They’re not standalone facilities that are in the middle of nowhere,” Ana Baptista, a Newark-native and professor at The New School who focuses on environmental justice, told NJ Advance Media.
“Even when they’re within their permit limits, they’re part of the problem,” she added.
The legacy of heavy pollution in these places has left residents, who are largely people of color, with higher rates of respiratory problems and at higher risk of COVID-19.
James Regan, a Covanta spokesman, said the locations of the company’s incinerators were chosen years before the company took them over.
“These facilities were sited by local governments for their use,” Regan said. “Covanta operates them as best we can with minimal environmental impact.”
Regan stressed that pollution from incinerators is dwarfed by tailpipe pollution from cars, trucks, buses and other transportation sources in the communities. The transportation sector is the state’s largest source of air pollution, according to the DEP.
But environmentalists argue it is misleading to compare a single source of pollution to the collective total of thousands of other smaller sources. They also point out that transportation pollution is predictable, and theoretically easier to address. Pollution from incinerators, however, can fluctuate based on the type of trash is being burned at a given time.
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