Stafford Incinerator in Virginia Not “Financially Beneficial”

- by Neil Seld­man, August 22, 2014, Insti­tute for Local Self-Reliance

The Region­al Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment Board that over­sees the Coun­ty and City of Fred­er­icks­burg land­fill will not pur­sue a garbage and indus­tri­al waste incin­er­a­tion-gasi­fi­ca­tion facil­i­ty. The Coun­ty received no bid that it con­sid­ered finan­cial­ly ben­e­fi­cial to the Coun­ty and City and dropped the project.

StopTheStaffordIncinerator.com has sub­mit­ted an FOIA Request to obtain copies of the pro­pos­als submitted.

• See local news sto­ry, R‑board expect­ed to toss alter­na­tive trash ideas.
• Also see, Don’t make coun­ty an incin­er­a­tor guinea pig
• Also see, Stafford nowhere near land­fill capacity

Cit­i­zens who have been opposed to the project for sev­er­al years were pleased with the deci­sion and are now press­ing the Coun­ty to imple­ment expand­ed recy­cling and com­post­ing. Despite hav­ing decades left of land­fill capac­i­ty, the region­al author­i­ty want­ed an incinerator. 

Bill John­son, StopTheStaffordIncinerator.com activist, wants to unite the gov­ern­ment, busi­ness and cit­i­zens to plan and imple­ment recy­cling and enter­pris­es expan­sion under a zero waste pol­i­cy ini­tia­tive. The coun­ty and city have decades of land­fill capac­i­ty avail­able; a key rea­son why there was no need to rush into an incin­er­a­tor-based solu­tion. “Now is the time to expand recy­cling and com­post­ing so that the land­fill will serve house­holds and busi­ness­es for gen­er­a­tions to come,” said Johnson.

Mike Ewall, direc­tor of Ener­gy Jus­tice Net­work, has been the prime source of tech­ni­cal assis­tance observes that this is the sec­ond polit­i­cal­ly and fis­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive coun­ty in the Mid Atlantic region to reject garbage incin­er­a­tion as an accept­able sol­id waste man­age­ment approach. Car­roll Coun­ty, MD paid $1 mil­lion this year to get out of a con­tract for garbage incin­er­a­tion. In June, Ener­gy Jus­tice Net­work helped cit­i­zens in Lor­ton, VA get their Fair­fax Coun­ty, VA to reject a 50 year expan­sion of a con­struc­tion and demo­li­tion land­fill due to close in 2016.

ILSR and Urban Ore, Berke­ley, CA sup­port­ed the cit­i­zens in Stafford Coun­ty and Lor­ton through work­shops and guest arti­cles in the local media.