People concerned about air and water quality may assume that a plant burning garbage is bad for the environment, which is why residents of Maryland’s Montgomery County – with a population of 1.2 million – are talking about closing their incinerator – which has operated for 30 years -- and trucking trash to one of two Virginia landfill in Chesterfield or Amelia Counties.
Enter Vivian Thomson, a retired professor of environmental policy at UVA. She now lives in Maryland and works with an environmental group called Friends of Sligo Creek. In her opinion, it might make more sense to keep the county’s incinerator going.
“The county committed to do a number of studies over the years to see if the incinerator was having an impact on local air quality. Those studies found no perceptible effect.”
That’s because the incinerator is designed to trap and treat harmful pollutants like mercury and dioxins. Landfills, on the other hand, emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and they threaten water quality.
“They generate huge amounts of leachate, and EPA has said that no matter how well-designed modern landfills are, they will all – eventually – leak," Thomson explains.
Kit Gage, with Friends of Sligo Creek, says the county should take a closer look at costs before making a decision rather than relying on public opinion.
“The general populace has been hearing about incinerators and has said, ‘Oooh, incinerators are bad. They’re dirty. We should shut them down.”
Opponents of landfilling also note that option could mean 15,000 more truck trips in and out of Montgomery County each year, and Thomson notes that burning trash allows Montgomery to earn money by generating electricity.
“There’s about $24 million of revenue from selling the electricity, and I believe that also includes revenues from selling the salvaged metals, which are quite valuable," Thomson says.
And, finally, those who are calling for greater debate wonder if it’s fair to put the burden of trash from a relatively wealthy county in Maryland on a low-income community in Virginia.
