Folks, Sullivan County, NY recently unveiled its draft 10-year plan for managing solid waste—in other words, our garbage. 

At 470 pages, the document is daunting. Then you realize that the actual plan is much shorter. Fully 320 pages are appendices. Other pages include recycling brochures, a table of transfer stations and a flyer for the Town of Bethel's clean-up day in 2022—not exactly such stuff as plans are made on. 

One cannot help but wonder whether the goal of creating such an unwieldy document was to discourage the public from actually reading it. 

That said, there are some praiseworthy things in the plan. My favorite appears on page 24, and reads: "It is the intent that a reduction in waste will be achieved by diverting materials from the waste stream for recycling, reuse, or composting."  YES! 

Other useful ideas include increased outreach and education about recycling, along with increased enforcement. Especially pragmatic is the suggestion to supply trash haulers with fuel instead of paying a surcharge for theirs. 

Now for the really bad idea: The plan proposes conducting a feasibility study for a "waste-to-energy burner"—in other words, a trash incinerator. 

These facilities are extremely expensive to build, and construction requires significant government subsidies. The price tag is in the hundreds of millions, and can climb as high as a billion dollars. 

Incinerators are expensive to operate, too. So companies invariably include a "put-or-pay" clause in the contract, meaning the client promises to supply a minimum amount of trash. 

Such a clause forced Detroit to import garbage from nearby suburbs. Urban residents were actually subsidizing their wealthy neighbors to send trash to the city's incinerator. That "put-or-pay" clause is the primary reason Detroit went bankrupt. 

Similarly, staggering debt payments to upgrade Harrisburg's incinerator drove Pennsylvania's capital into bankruptcy.

Half the cost of an incinerator goes to pollution control equipment, which concentrates pollutants in filters, ash and wastewater. These toxic byproducts need to be sent to a special landfill designed to handle hazardous waste. Both the transportation costs and the "tipping fee" for hazardous waste are significantly higher than for ordinary municipal solid waste. 

But the true costs of incinerators aren't just financial. Burning trash releases a laundry list of toxic emissions. Some of the more familiar ones are lead, mercury, dioxins, particulate matter and PFAS, the forever chemicals. 

There is no safe level of any of these substances. 

Three years ago, people in Lausanne, Switzerland learned their soil is contaminated with dioxins—which are among the world's most carcinogenic compounds—from a municipal waste incinerator that had been shut down in 2005. Now they can no longer eat vegetables from their own gardens or eat local free-range eggs. 

This is not an isolated instance. High levels of dioxins have been found in eggs from backyard flocks within three kilometers of incinerators all over the world, including France, the Netherlands and the U.K. 

Incinerators have been linked to a slew of negative health effects, from increased risk of miscarriage and pre-term delivery to birth defects and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, among others. 

Needless to say, incinerator companies don't pay residents' medical bills—let alone assuage families' heartache. 

There is no easy, off-the-shelf solution that will magically make our waste problem go away. Rather than an incinerator, the county would be better off deploying our limited resources on the wholehearted, good-faith pursuit of its stated intention of diverting materials from the waste stream. 

We need to invest in infrastructure for the reuse, recovery and more effective recycling of materials. We also need to greatly expand the county’s existing composting operation, as outlined in the plan. These strategies all fall under the rubric of "zero waste," and federal grants are available to implement such programs. 

The county's draft solid waste management plan acknowledges that such programs could reduce our waste stream by 50 percent. Why invest in an outrageously expensive boondoggle when more cost-effective and sustainable solutions exist? 

Rebekah Creshkoff is a retired communications professional and a co-founder of Beyond Plastics Sullivan County NY. She lives in Callicoon. 

What you can do

If you don't want an incinerator in our region, submit a comment on Sullivan County's solid waste management plan to recycling@sullivanny.us, or to:

Mark Witkowski
SCDPW Deputy Commissioner
P.O. Box 5012
Monticello, NY 12701

Comments must be received by Tuesday, October 15.

Links:

1. What is particle pollution? American Lung Association
2. High levels of dioxin found in Lausanne soils. SWI swissinfo.ch
3. How Communities Have Defined Zero Waste. Environmental Protection Agency
4. Burned: Why Waste Incineration Is Harmful. NRDC, the National Resources Defense Council
5. Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling Grants for Communities. Environmental Protection Agency
6. Defense Council Points to Downside of Waste Incineration. NRDC
7. FACT SHEET: Trash Incineration (“Waste-to-Energy”). Energy Justice Network (2 pages)
8. How polluting is the Wheelabrator trash incinerator in Peekskill? Energy Justice Network (2 pages)
9. Pollution and Health Impacts of Waste-to-Energy Incineration. GAIA, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (6 pages)
10. Facts About "WTE" Facilities. GAIA (8 pages)
11. High Cost of Waste Incineration. GAIA (12 pages)
12. Zero Waste DC Plan, February 2024 (18 pages)
13. New Jersey's Dirty Secret. Earth Justice (20 pages)
14. Closing Montgomery County’s Incinerator and Implementing Zero Waste, March 2023 (84 pages)
15. Waste Incineration and the Environment. IPEN, the International Pollutants Elimination Network (296 pages)
16. Sullivan County Local Solid Waste Management Plan. Final Draft for Public Comment, July 2024. (470 pages)

Video:

1. Let's Talk Sullivan. Sullivan County Legislature chair Nadia Rajsz and Joe Perrello, chair of the Public Works committee, discuss their interest in an incinerator. June 28, 2024 (6:21) 
2. No incinerator for the Catskills! GAIA webinar (1:08:05)
3. Burn Baby Burn? Why Incinerations "Waste-to-Energy" Is a False Solution. Energy Justice Network webinar (1:30:03)