Sullivan County waste-to-energy incinerator alarms environmentalists
MONTICELLO - Environmentalists are bristling at the suggestion that Sullivan County could dispose of its garbage with a trash-to-fuel plant, a measure put forth in a third-party draft plan commissioned by the county to figure out how to get rid of its garbage for the next decade.
The southern Catskills county currently trucks its waste to Seneca Meadows landfills in northern New York, which costs the county about $10 million a year, according to county Manager Joshua Potosek. Seneca Meadows is seeking a permit from the state to expand as it runs short on space. But there is no guarantee the state will grant it, leading the counties that truck trash there to consider alternative measures.
Sullivan County has been dealing with far more garbage over the last few years. In 2010, Department of Public Works Commissioner Edward McAndrew said the county transported about 50,000 tons of trash to Seneca Meadows; by last year, that was 100,000 tons. The explosion was due to an increased number of residents and visitors during the summer, when the county's full-time population of 78,000 grows to hundreds of thousands.
The county's draft Local Solid Waste Management Plan, which runs more than 450 pages, includes many suggestions for making garbage disposal more environmentally friendly, including expanding a countywide composting program. It also suggests conducting three feasibility studies on new ways to dispose of the county's garbage: an efficiency review of the current methods; privatization; and the "construction of a waste to energy facility in Sullivan County."
Environmental groups such as Catskill Mountainkeeper and the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives are sounding the alarm about the third option, holding a webinar and putting their displeasure on the record at a public comments session last week in Monticello, where about 25 people showed up in opposition to the potential plant, despite the session being held at noon on a Thursday.
Waste-to-energy facilities break down garbage through combustion, a process that produces energy the facility then stores. The facilities then must dispose of the remaining ash in landfills, including particulate matter collected by the filtration systems on the facility's smokestacks.
The draft waste management plan takes into consideration new state waste management goals released in 2023, which include "to recover, in an environmentally acceptable manner, energy from solid waste that cannot be economically and technically reused or recycled," which the plan cites as its reasoning for suggesting the incinerator.
Jessica Roff, the plastics and petrochemicals program manager in the U.S. and Canada for the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, said during the webinar this week the term "waste-to-energy facilities" was "greenwashing" for what the facilities really are: incinerators. They "contaminate the air, the water and the soil around it with toxic materials," she said.
Roff was especially perturbed by Potosek and other county legislators touring an incinerator in Hempstead, Nassau County, owned and operated by ReWorld, formerly Covanta. Potosek wrote in his bimonthly county newsletter that the facility "opened our eyes to the possibilities."
Roff brought up a whistleblower complaint about the Hempstead facility, which claimed the company was thwarting state regulations regarding ash it dumped at a landfill in the town of Brookhaven. ReWorld has never admitted wrongdoing, and Brookhaven and the company are in the process of settling a subsequent lawsuit for $1 million, according to the Suffolk County News.
Catskill Mountainkeeper Associate Director Wes Gillingham said during the public comments that Sullivan County's health was already suffering, pointing to its ranking as the second-unhealthiest county in the state by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings and Roadmap report. The 2023 ranking was an improvement over 2022, when it was the least healthy. He also questioned a plant's construction costs and whether it was aligned with the state's 2019 climate goals.
McAndrew, the Department of Public Works commissioner, said the plant was only one of several suggestions in the report, and that the possibility of an incinerator was a long ways off.
The county is still accepting public comments via email until Oct. 15, which will become part of the draft waste management plan. The state Department of Environmental Conservation would have to accept the plan, and may require the county to change parts of it; McAndrew said there was already a back-and-forth between the county and the state. The final version would then need to be voted on by the county Legislature. All this must happen before the Legislature votes to undertake a feasibility study, which in no way binds the county to a plan.
At the end, it was all up to the state, McAndrew said.
Though the county's contract with Seneca Meadows expires at the end of the year, it has the option to extend it by a year, or possibly five years. But that hinges on the landfill getting a new permit from the state.
The Catskills have tangled with garbage disposal companies before. In 2019, Wheelabrator abandoned a plan to dump ash from its trash incinerators in a quarry in Catskill, and Hughes Energy similarly decided not to peruse a waste-to-biofuel plant in western Greene County proposed in 2019.
This story was originally published September 23, 2024, 3:31 PM.
