Beyond Incineration: Best Waste Management Strategies for Montgomery County, Maryland

Cov­an­ta’s trash incin­er­a­tor in Mont­gomery Coun­ty, Mary­land is the largest air indus­tri­al pol­luter in the coun­ty, by far. Fol­low­ing a mas­sive waste pile fire that burned for near­ly two weeks in late 2016, we’ve been sup­port­ing our mem­ber group, Sug­ar­loaf Cit­i­zens’ Asso­ci­a­tion, to close this incin­er­a­tor for good. We worked with them and oth­er local envi­ron­men­tal lead­ers form­ing Zero Waste Mont­gomery Coun­ty to issue the March 2021 report, “Beyond Incin­er­a­tion: Best Waste Man­age­ment Strate­gies for Mont­gomery Coun­ty, Mary­land” to sup­port the coun­ty’s com­mit­ment to end incineration. 

This report was cit­ed in the Decem­ber 3, 2021 let­ter from Coun­ty Exec­u­tive Marc Elrich announc­ing plans to close this coun­ty-owned, Cov­an­ta-oper­at­ed trash incin­er­a­tor (one of the youngest in the coun­try) with­in 12–18 months. This dead­line was missed, how­ev­er, and the coun­ty is now delay­ing the incin­er­a­tor’s clo­sure until an alter­na­tive waste pro­cess­ing facil­i­ty is in place. 

While polit­i­cal lead­ers seem to think that incin­er­a­tion is bet­ter than land­fill­ing, and do not real­ize that the coun­ty is land­fill­ing tox­ic ash in a Black com­mu­ni­ty near Rich­mond, Vir­ginia, this detailed report doc­u­ments how incin­er­a­tion is actu­al­ly far worse than land­fill­ing and that no trans­porta­tion dis­tance to a land­fill can jus­ti­fy con­tin­ued in-coun­ty incin­er­a­tion. This report analy­ses the alter­na­tives, and rec­om­mends what the coun­ty should do. It debunks pro-incin­er­a­tor pro­pa­gan­da by Cov­an­ta and the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency. Fur­ther resources on incin­er­a­tion are on our incin­er­a­tion page.

Find the report here: energyjustice.net/md/beyond.pdf

The Pow­er­Point with overview slides is here

The report’s chap­ters include:

Chap­ter 1: Zero Waste Strate­gies Have More Poten­tial than DEP & HDR Por­tray
Chap­ter 2: The Case Against Incin­er­a­tion
Chap­ter 3: Green­house Gas­es & Cre­ative Account­ing
Chap­ter 4: Land­fill­ing vs. Incin­er­a­tion
Chap­ter 5: Envi­ron­men­tal Racism
Chap­ter 6: Site 2 Land­fill
Chap­ter 7: Choos­ing the Best Land­fill
Chap­ter 8: Cost of Incin­er­a­tion vs. Land­fill­ing
Chap­ter 9: The path for­ward

Chap­ter 4’s Life Cycle Analy­sis proves that incin­er­a­tion (and land­fill­ing ash) is far worse than direct land­fill­ing, even after fac­tor­ing in much larg­er trans­porta­tion dis­tances. Long-haul truck or rail to land­fill sites amount­ed to only about 3% of the green­house gas impacts of land­fill­ing. The chart below sum­ma­rizes the find­ing, com­par­ing the Mont­gomery Coun­ty trash incin­er­a­tor to the com­pos­ite results of 10 land­fills stud­ied. Incin­er­a­tion at the coun­ty’s incin­er­a­tor has health and envi­ron­men­tal impacts total­ing $258.58/ton while land­fill­ing (aver­age of 10 land­fills stud­ied) totaled $80.15/ton — impacts that are more than three times low­er than incineration.