The planning commission voted against recommending the Elcon Recycling Services proposed hazardous waste treatment facility at the site of a former U.S. Steel operation.

Chris Ullery reports for the Burlington County Times 

The Falls planning commission voted not to recommend plans for the controversial application from Elcon Recycling Services on Tuesday night amid cheers from a crowd of 80 people and after a word of warning from an attorney representing the company.

The 4-0 vote, with commission member Mary Leszczuk absent, came shortly after several public comments urging the panel to reject the plan and recommend the supervisors deny Elcon’s plant to process between 150,00 to 210,000 tons of chemicals and pharmaceutical waste each year.

Kim Freimuth, of Fox Rothschild, represented Elcon at the meeting and said early in the hearing the company was not seeking a vote from the commission Tuesday, and just prior to the vote it could have legal consequences. The panel voted anyway.

Freimuth said during the meeting the company was in the process of amending the application to address concerns and land development issues raised by the township’s staff and fire marshal

.A request to continue the meeting was not granted and Freimuth said the company was willing to come to a future meeting to address questions raised Tuesday that went beyond the scope of land development.

“We’re here to determine whether its appropriate for the zoning district and the planning commission, the legal stuff is up to the lawyers,” Commission Chairman Brian Binney said after the meeting.

“We determined that we didn’t feel it was appropriate for where they were proposing to put it.”

The company aims to build the facility on a 23-acre site in the Keystone Industrial Port Complex, an approximately 3,000-acre industrial park encompassing the former footprint of U.S. Steel’s Fairless Works operation not far from the Delaware River.

Elcon representatives say its facility would be state of the art and create up to 120 short-term construction jobs and about 50 full-time operations jobs. The company has said the plant would produce little pollution and adhere to all environmental regulations. Opponents, primarily made up of local residents and backed by local environmental groups, are skeptical.

Over the past several years, the proposal has ping-ponged, as Elcon submitted proposal materials and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection temporarily rejected them for deficiencies. But the latest version, submitted last July, cleared an initial bar, putting DEP on track to issue an intent to approve or deny in May.

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Chris Fry reports for JERSEY DIGS 

A stroll around Hoboken’s only higher education facility presently features a soundtrack of construction buzz, and the biggest project on campus that looks to reshape the city’s skyline will be commencing in the coming weeks.

Two glass towers and a new university center will soon be rising on a hilltop property at Stevens Institute of Technology, who recently put up fencing around two buildings just south of the Howe Center. Demolition work is slated to commence soon at Jacobus and Hayden Halls, two older brick buildings that will be replaced by the ambitious University Center.

The project is made possible by new zoning enacted by the city last year, which created a University District that allowed greater building height in certain areas of the campus. Hoboken’s planning board later approved the institute’s 75,000-square-foot University Center, which will be LEED Silver Certified and rise about 222 feet at the highest point. Plans were drawn up by Baltimore-based Design Collective and Wallace Roberts and Todd.

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The company says it needs the project, which would increase local gas capacity by 14 percent, to meet demand.

Mark Harrington reports for Newsday

National Grid will begin notifying the dozens of midsize companies that apply for new natural-gas service that it won’t be able to supply them with firm gas service if a new undersea pipeline fails to win New York state approval, a company official said.

It’s the latest move by the company to highlight its need for a supply project that would increase local gas capacity by 14 percent, easing demand constraints, National Grid says.

Con Edison has issued similar moratorium alerts. The latest letters this week will include a footnote that tells customers their future service is “contingent on the successful and timely approval and permitting” of the Northeast Supply Enhancement Project, a $1 billion pipeline to bring an additional 400 million cubic feet of natural gas per day to the region, connecting to existing infrastructure in the Rockaways, the company official said Tuesday.

National Grid announced in February that it had put 35 large customers on notice about a potential moratorium on new gas service, informing them of its inability to supply “firm” gas service to planned projects such as the redevelopment of Belmont Park. The new notifications to midsize customers — those with businesses of around 15,000 square feet — is the latest move by the company to highlight the need for the new pipeline.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation has previously rejected the company’s water quality permit application, and the state Public Service Commission has said several big development projects can move forward without new natural gas infrastructure. The DEC, in a statement, said it will “continue to rigorously evaluate these applications to protect public health and the environment and to ensure all applicable standards are met.“

“We can’t make a commitment to new customers,” said John Bruckner, president of National Grid New York, a subsidiary of London-based National Grid, adding that the letters will go to 48 midsize customers with previous requests for service and to the two to three dozen new business customers that request gas service each week.

“We’re giving them that information so that they can plan their businesses accordingly.” ”National Grid has previously said that, if it fails to get the state permit by May 15, it will be forced to declare a moratorium on all new gas hookups for Long Island and New York City.

Bruckner said that means all customers, including new residential hookups and those converting to gas service for their homes, will receive letters stating, “We will no longer be able to accept new applications for service.” National Grid receives around 7,800 new residential requests for service each year, including around 6,000 conversions from oil to natural gas, on Long Island and the Rockaways.

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Neil Seldman & Peter Anderson offered their opinion in WasteDive

The Atlantic and The New York Times recently carried near identical stories about what they portrayed as the “end of recycling” due to China’s ban on scrap imports from the U.S. They outlined how this sent the price of recycling soaring, causing some cities to begin cutting down or even eliminating programs and sending materials to incinerators or landfills.They got some of the story right, but omitted the fact that some 20 years ago, Big Waste companies made a deliberate decision to disrupt the then well-functioning dual-stream systems by convincing cities to switch to single-stream recycling. This caused contamination rates to increase and led to the market crunch started by Chinese import restrictions

Pitfalls of single-stream recycling

Recycling is a cyclical industry. In the past 50 years, commodity prices fell — in some cases more than they have during the current China-induced crisis. In each instance, many in the media proclaimed the death of recycling. Each time, recycling revived and returned better than before.

After rising quickly in the 1980s and 1990s, recycling rates slowed in 2000 and peaked to around 34% by 2010, where, according to the most recent EPA data, the country has remained since. Most cities had programs that collected paper separately from glass, metal, and plastic, minimizing contamination and allowing for cost-effective processing that was attractive to local and regional markets. 

According to a 2016 EPA study (based on 2007 data), the U.S. recycling industry comprised of more than 757,000 jobs, $36.6 billion in wages and $6.7 billion in tax revenue.

At the close of the 20th century, most homes had a recycling service. Recyclables that were collected in dual-stream systems had less than 10% contamination at local sorting facilities, which made them highly desirable to domestic processing plants. Citizens and small business networks did their job to promote recycling by working hard and long to promote laws that mandated recycling and composting. Other new rules encouraged reuse and minimum scrap content in finished products. Container deposit laws, dedicated industrial parks and waste surcharges that capitalized a public-private recycling infrastructure were all components of an increasingly sophisticated system that waste hauling companies had to adhere to in order to keep their market share while still allowing small local operations to flourish.

Wall Street told Big Waste for decades that recycling diversion was “the enemy of [waste industry] profits” that had to be halted — or materials would continue to be diverted from landfills, “where they are supposed to go.” The vibrant, environmentally-sound network was disrupted. Big Waste was content with a stagnation of U.S. recycling at 34%, which kept their lucrative hauling and landfill monopolies in place.

The nation’s largest waste collection and disposal companies pushed a system that allowed all recyclables to be dumped in the same container, promising that this would lead to increased diversion from landfills — and cities eagerly adopted it.

Single-stream collection replaced dual-stream at an accelerated pace after being introduced in the 1990s, and by the mid-2000s, it was well on its way toward becoming the predominant collection method throughout the country. Today, 9 of the 10 largest U.S. cities use single-stream. Single-stream systems did increase participation, but not actual recycling — contamination levels climbed toward 30% in some cases.

For a number of years, China was willing to accept these increasingly contaminated bales, becoming the favorite dumping ground for America’s waste companies. U.S. residents believed that whatever they dumped into that single container ended up being recycled. Then, China wised up as labor costs rose in its expanding economy. The country stopped accepting our contaminated materials, and soon other importing countries did the same.

But by that time — like Gresham’s law about bad money pushing good money out of circulation — China’s two-decade willingness to accept contaminated materials had already undermined U.S. recycling markets. This made cities dependent on large-scale processing facilities that produced low-grade materials and often don’t recover any quality glass – 20% of the single-stream recycling mix.

In many cases, the companies that run these facilities also manage — and profit far more from — collection and landfill disposal, disincentivizing them from maximizing recycling. Big Waste promoted the mantra of single-stream with evangelical enthusiasm.

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Eric Holthaus reports for Grist

NOAA’s National Water Center released an ominous map that shows what flooding could look across the US in 2019.
“This is shaping up to be a potentially unprecedented flood season, with more than 200 million people at risk for flooding in their communities,” the center’s director said.

Across the Midwest, the recent floods have already caused an estimated $3 billion in damages.
Rainfall in the eastern US is now between 29 and 55% heavier than it was 60 years ago. 

“This is shaping up to be a potentially unprecedented flood season, with more than 200 million people at risk for flooding in their communities,” said Ed Clark, director of NOAA’s National Water Center, in a press release. That represents about 60 percent of all Americans.

Across the Midwest, the recent floods have already caused an estimated $3 billion in damages— a total that will surely rise. Extremely heavy snowfall in the upper Midwest this winter, combined with a forecast for a wetter-than-normal spring, set the stage for this calamity. With the exception of Florida and New England, soil moisture in much of the eastern United States is above the 99th percentile — literally off the charts. When the ground is this saturated, there’s nowhere for water to go but into streams and rivers, taking precious topsoil with it and carving lasting changes into the land.

NOAA

And that’s exactly what’s been happening in Nebraska, whereflood-protection infrastructure has been utterly overwhelmed by record-setting water levels. Virtually every levee on the Missouri River between Omaha and Kansas City has been breached in the last week. “I don’t think there’s ever been a disaster this widespread in Nebraska,” said Governor Pete Ricketts.
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