The incinerator sits in a residential neighborhood in Hudson Falls, by the Hudson River, a waterway that has already been contaminated with 500,000 pounds of PCB waste by General Electric. It is a mere half-mile from the city's drinking water reservoir, one mile from an elementary school and within five miles of dairy farms and pasture lands. And even if the trash burner meets the requirements of its operating permit - which many incinerators fail to do - it will still be allowed to spew 3.7 tons of lead and 1,382 pounds of mercury into the air each year.
The small, mostly rural counties are paying over $22 million more than what Foster Wheeler representatives initially said the burner would cost. The incinerator's promoters enthusiastically overestimated the amount of garbage that the local counties would feed the incinerator, so in order to comply with the guaranteed tonnage clause that appears in the incinerator's contract (and in most incinerator contracts), the counties are heavily subsidizing the importation of waste from outlying areas, while residents pay the highest fees in the state. Built to burn residential waste, the incinerator is now burning whatever waste it can - industrial waste, pharmaceuticals; the counties have even threatened to burn collected recyclables.
Disputes about the controversial incinerator have spurred at least a half-dozen lawsuits, making it the most litigated burner in North America. After 328 residents sued the proponents of the incinerator, which included the county government, the county countersued the residents (with their own tax dollars) for $1.5 million on the grounds that the residents' suit negatively affected the bond rating for the burner.
The scenario unraveling in Hudson Falls is astonishing, but hardly unique. Increasingly, communities across North America are waging similar battles against incinerators, which the trash industry continues to tout as a solution to the garbage crisis.
But citizens fighting incinerators have reason to believe that the smoke may be clearing. Some of the most outspoken critics of trash incineration now come not from environmental groups but from municipalities that have been burned by incinerators. The New York City Comptroller's Office, for example, published a 1992 report Burn, Baby, Burn: How to Dispose of Garbage by Polluting Land, Sea and Air at Enormous Cost. Bans on incineration now exist in West Virginia, Rhode Island and the Canadian province of Ontario, and cancellations of existing contracts for incinerators have outnumbered new contracts every year since 1987.
Growing opposition to incineration, combined with the inherent problems with incinerator technology, have soured the economic outlook for the industry. An August 11, 1993 Wall Street Journal article warned investors that "[v]ery simply, the current economics [of incineration] are terrible. ... And things could go from bad to worse."
Opposition to the industry has also emerged in the U.S. Congress, where Reps. Bill Richardson, D-New Mexico, and Edolphus Towns, D-New York, have introduced legislation that would place common-sense, modest restrictions on MSW incinerators. Their bill would prevent the locating of facilities near schools and drinking water sources, and prohibit the incineration of batteries, chlorinated plastics and household hazardous waste. If the bill does eventually pass, its requirements may prove restrictive enough to kill many incinerator proposals.
If the battle over incineration sounds familiar, perhaps it is due to the eerie parallels with the struggle to close down the nuclear power industry. Indeed, many incineration firms tried to sell nuclear power as the safe energy alternative of the future. These same players - companies such as Westinghouse, Blount and Babcock & Wilcox - as well as their coaches - the supporting consultants, investment bankers and lawyers - have changed uniforms, but they still have the same interest in capital-intensive megaprojects that generate long-term corporate profits, while imposing environmental and financial risks on local communities.
These merchants operate in a world of secrecy, where bribes and conflicts of interest abound and money greases the decision-making process. A rapidly-spinning revolving door connects the trash industry and the environmental regulators. The appearance of corruption, collusion and unseemly coincidence in the regulatory-industrial complex is endemic. Take, for example, former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official Lou Crampton, who worked on the infamous Waste Technologies Inc. (WTI) incinerator case in East Liverpool, Ohio for the EPA just before transferring to WMX - formerly Waste Management, Inc. - which has had a controlling interest in many aspects of the WTI project.
Proponents of incineration rely on "risk assessment," which surmises the added risk of cancer death from a new facility. There are myriad flaws with the methodology of risk assessment, but the fundamental defect is in debating risks when viable alternatives that present no risks are available.
And alternatives to incineration do exist: Seattle is well on its way to recycling 60 percent of its waste; several states have recycling targets of 50 percent; and the city of Toronto has a plan to reduce its total waste by 90 percent by the year 2030. Germany has implemented a "polluter-pay" law that requires companies to take back and recycle packaging from their products.
While alternatives are proving their worth, they cannot succeed under the regime of incineration. Incineration contracts impose penalties if a guaranteed amount of waste is not burned, effectively imposing a ceiling on recycling. Moreover, once a community has invested its waste management resources on incineration, few funds remain for a meaningful recycling program.
The technological "fix" of incineration has proved to be nothing more than a smokescreen for corporate greed. The time is long overdue for a comprehensive ban on these toxic money pits that have compromised the health, environment, economy and democracy of communities nationwide.