While the trash incineration industry is seizing this moment to try and sell municipalities their rebranded forms of yesterday’s technologies, there is an opportunity to embrace a better approach, Mandy Gunasekara says.
By Mandy Gunasekara, Star-Ledger guest columnist
The New Jersey legislature recently passed a food-waste recycling bill designed to better align the state’s waste-management processes with today’s understandings and societal expectations.
Legislators no doubt had the best of intentions while crafting this bill – which is on its way to the governor for signature into law – but it has a glaring loophole that stands to undermine its entire purpose. A last-minute amendment added trash incinerators to the list of approved recycling facilities. If burning New Jersey’s food waste strikes you as a major step backward in local waste management and counter to the basic meaning of recycling, then you are on the right track.
Reading through the text of the amendment it would be hard to find this provision given incinerators are rarely mentioned by their old, honest name, but instead have a new, more enlightened one – “resource recovery facilities.” While effective PR campaigns and lobbying efforts have changed the look and feel of these trash burning facilities on paper, little has changed in terms of the technology.
A last-minute change to a bill originally meant to expand composting in the Garden State could instead send food waste to landfills and incinerators.
Some facilities have added heat capturing capabilities in an effort to produce energy. The PR brigade refers to these as “waste-to-energy,” which sounds great, but this has proved both inefficient and extremely costly in practice. It actually costs $8.33 per megawatt-hour to make energy out of waste incineration. For comparison, pulverized coal only costs $4.25 per megawatt-hour; nuclear energy costs $2.04.
From an environmental perspective, burning trash is equally problematic. Air pollutants are an inevitable biproduct of the process, but there is a more recent concern that incinerators are also releasing Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances more commonly referred to as PFAS. These chemicals have been the subject of growing public concern, which prompted EPA to issue an action plan to address it. In the meantime, trash incinerators do not have the same level of pollution control capabilities for PFAS as they do other air pollutants.
