Chapter 5: Sierra Club Michigan's Incinerator Fights

By Ed McArdle

Among the many issues that the Michigan Chapter and its Southeast Michigan Group (SEMG) have been involved in, it seems that our campaigns to close incinerators and promote recycling have created the most drama, blood, sweat and tears.  Let’s start with the biggest, Detroit’s giant garbage incinerator, which is the largest by capacity in the nation and possibly the world.  

Sierra Club was an early opponent of Detroit's incinerator, thanks to the late Dennis Piper who originally led SEMG's  way through many actions in 1986-1988 to educate the public and officials about the many dangers of burning garbage.  There were many actions such as hundreds who attended public hearings, marches, parades with lock downs and arrests.  Dennis even did a televised TV debate with Mayor Coleman Young’s representative Bella Marshall.  Dennis also was involved in helping to arrange for Greenpeace climbers to scale the incinerator stacks and Ambassador Bridge who then stayed for days in hammocks with banners flying.  They had to be removed with special police helicopters. 

Unfortunately, these actions negatively polarized the media and the public.  Burning is popular, people think it makes garbage disappear, creates energy and saves landfill space.  Of course that is only partly true and the trade-offs in pollution and human health are more severe.  According to the EPA 90% of our waste stream can be recycled. The Sierra Club joined with Environmental Defense Fund, Detroit Audubon, Evergreen Alliance and later a Cass Corridor neighborhood group in a lawsuit demanding the new bag house/scrubber pollution controls be installed and for the city to initiate a comprehensive recycling program. The lawsuit dragged on, draining more resources from the SEMG and Chapter but finally success came as the city was forced to install the new controls at great expense.  But even with the new controls there are still massive amounts of acid gasses, heavy metals, mercury, particulates and the most toxic substance known to science--dioxins--all of which end up in the air, and the ash, which has to be dumped in special designated landfills. Many of these toxins then bio-accumulate into the food chain. 

The chapter continued the lawsuit to force the city to recycle but to no avail.  However, some years later SEMG volunteer Anna Holden and myself kept going to the incinerator authority meetings, city council and joined with Zero Waste Detroit to convince the authority to divert some funds for a warehouse drop off and for a time a couple of mobile residential drop offs.  When Detroit was host to the World Social Forum in 2013, over a thousand participants from all over the country marched with us to close the incinerator. It wasn’t until the Detroit bankruptcy that the city accepted our plan in part for curbside recycling but the monster is still burning.  

The Madison Heights incinerator campaign was going on at the same time as the Detroit incinerator.  Again, led by SEMG’s Dennis Piper and local groups we engaged in marches and public hearings to close it down.  The incinerator did close when it was discovered that lead emissions had contaminated an adjacent elementary school playground.

While we were busy with the above two incinerators, we discovered that there was another so-called waste-to-energy incinerator expansion in Dearborn Heights.  Five Wayne County communities that had virtually no recycling in 1994 entered into a contract with Constellation Energy to burn 800 tons per day. You would have thought that they would have learned from the Detroit experience of all the expense and problems that these facilities pose, but no!  So we pursued the same strategies of speaking up at city councils, demonstrations, public hearings and the media with some hard fought success.  But now we added a new twist to the strategy in which we went to adjacent cities and townships to pass resolutions banning their garbage from fueling this oversized incinerator.  Over the following years, the incinerator incurred many equipment breakdowns, suffered fines for pollution violations and could never compete with cheaper landfills.  In 2003 the incinerator went bankrupt and was demolished in 2004.  Our hammering away at authority and council meetings to demand the recycling alternative did pay off as Dearborn Heights installed a comprehensive curbside pickup and Westland has one of the best recycling programs and participation rates in the state.

But the most effective, far- reaching and satisfying campaign aimed to shut down the Henry Ford Hospital medical waste incinerator in Detroit.  According to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, there were an estimated 157 hospitals burning medical waste, most without any pollution controls.  The EPA estimated that this was the second largest source of dioxins to the atmosphere.  When SEMG volunteers happened to see a permit application for Henry Ford to upgrade their incinerator and asked for a meeting, hospital officials refused to meet with us to discuss alternatives such as recycling.  At the public hearing we flew in an air pollution expert from Texas to testify at our own expense.  Later, Anna Holden organized a coalition that included local churches, The Ecology Center of Ann Arbor, the national nurse-based Health Care Without Harm, and Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice to do demonstrations, circulate petitions and post yard signs in surrounding neighborhoods.    

The hospital received its permit and spent a couple of million dollars on new control equipment but flunked the initial stack test because of cadmium emissions.  At that point, the hospital decided that maybe it should meet with us after all.  With expert help from a recycling consultant, Jim Frey, they were convinced to recycle their non-biohazard waste which comprised 90% of their waste stream and send the remainder to a steam processor to safely landfill it. The plan meant they would save money and not poison their neighborhood with heavy metals, acid gasses and dioxins. 

In the meantime, we tried to meet with other hospitals in the area but received little response.  Senator Gary Peters, then a state senator, deserves a shout out for his offer to initiate legislation to curb medical waste incineration. When we attended the Senate committee hearing in Lansing, we were astounded to hear the DEQ testify that all medical waste incinerators were either shut down or planned to in the near future.  We later learned from Tracy Easthope of the Ecology Center that other hospitals had followed Henry Ford’s lead as this information got circulated at large industry conferences.  So, what followed? Of course, we presented an award to Nancy Schickling, the former CEO, at a hospital association function.

That left only one last hold out, a small but dirty commercial medical waste incinerator in Hamtramck. With Anna Holden’s leadership, the coalition she had assembled--now energized more than ever--pushed the DEQ and the recalcitrant owner of the incinerator to finally close shop. The coalition worked with city council, churches and mosques to put pressure on the DEQ, and over time, it worked, and the incinerator finally gave up.  So with concentrating on one key facility and involving a wide range of people we were able to leverage much greater effects.  

I assembled this narrative mostly from memory and others involved no doubt have additional things they could contribute. What is missing most in this narrative are the personal connections, comradeship and stories that, even though the results are not immediately known, make these struggles well worthwhile.  

Jackson Municipal Waste Incinerator

By Mark Muhich

The municipal solid waste incinerator in Jackson County closed in 2013 after nearly 30 years of operation and innumerable breakdowns. Euphemistically called the County Resource Recovery Facility (RRF), it incinerated about 80,000 tons of municipal solid waste per year, and generated electricity for the adjacent Southern Michigan Prison. Because millions of dollars in construction bonds were sold to build the RRF, a “flow control ordinance” was enacted requiring all solid waste collected in Jackson County to be delivered to the RRF incinerator, resulting in the highest per ton tipping fees for Jackson County residents in the entire midwest!

Sierra Club lobbied hard for county administrators and politicians to close the incinerator. The Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, GAIA, and the American Lung Association also worked with us to close the uneconomical and unhealthy RRF. The final decision to shut it down came after the Michigan Department of Corrections refused to renew the power purchase agreement with the county, citing high cost and unreliable electrical delivery.

To learn more, click here to read an op-ed I wrote for the Jackson Citizen Patriot in 2013.

 

Chapter 6: Sierra Club Michigan Protects the Great Lakes

Michigan is defined by the Great Lakes, but our region’s relationship with the largest reservoirs of fresh water on earth has alternated between treating them with respect and turning them into cesspools of waste. The Great Lakes have always provided abundant fresh water, transportation and fisheries that helped both indigenous and post-European settlement communities become major sites of commerce and industry. Michigan’s mineral resources, forests, food and fur resources were exploited more efficiently because of easy access to shipping on the lakes.  Each of these developments, along with growing population centers, had an adverse impact on the lakes.

From the time that fur traders first used voyageur canoes to carry their goods to markets, to the blue-green algae creating a dead zone in Lake Erie from nutrient run off today, the Great Lakes have suffered from pollution, impairment and destruction. For 50 years, the Sierra Club in Michigan has worked to reverse the harm caused to the Great Lakes, its tributaries and its shorelands, and to restore health to its unique ecosystem. Paraphrasing Sierra Club founder John Muir, it is fair to say,“when we try to pick out anything in Michigan by itself, we find it hitched to everything else related to the Great Lakes region.” You’ll find stories of Sierra Club’s work on many of the issues related to the Great Lakes throughout our history blog. In this article, our focus will be on issues directly related to Great Lakes water pollution threats, clean up and prevention, and the Sierra Club’s Great Lakes program, founded in the 1980’s by then Sierra Club Midwest Regional Director Jane Elder, (http://vault.sierraclub.org/planet/199509/great.asp ) who had also served as the Michigan Chapter’s first staff member.

Sometimes the more obvious something is, the harder it is to see. No one can miss the Great Lakes, but their very size means that it has taken major crises for the impact of pollution in the lakes to be recognized as more than just a localized issue. The “death” of Lake Erie in the 1960s, and the multiple times the Cuyahoga River, an Ohio tributary, caught fire helped galvanize nationwide concern about the dumping of pollution into our waterways, and helped spark the environmental movement. The Sierra Club Mackinac (Michigan) Chapter was born in this time, with significant focus on protecting wild lands, including the iconic shorelines of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.  Sierra Club worked with local, state and national organizations through the 1970s and 1980s in securing the bedrock pollution laws that created the basic policy framework we live with today, including both water quality and air quality laws.  In that somewhat giddy time when we had achieved a national consensus that environmental protection was critical for the well-being of our state and nation, not only were efforts supported to stop new pollution, there was a growing awareness that additional threats that were less visible than black smoke and dead fish needed to be tackled as well.

The Fight to Regulate Air Toxics

One particularly insidious pollution problem came to light in the late 1970’s as scientists documented the presence of DDT, PCBs and other toxic substances in the fish in Lake Siskiwit, a lake in the middle of Isle Royale. These chemicals could only have come into this largest lake in the largest island in Lake Superior through air transport, a previously unrecognized source of pollution. Over time, “air toxics” have been identified as one of the largest contributors to contamination of our waterways and the creatures living there. In Michigan, virtually every waterway carries a warning about limiting consumption of wild caught fish because of the presence of persistent, bioaccumulative chemicals and mercury, with much of the source of these pollutants known to come from the air. While there are many sources of air toxins, major contributors include emissions from coal fired power plants, incinerators of both solid and hazardous wastes, emissions from chemical factories and other industrial operations. DDT, which was banned from use in the USA, was found to have been transported extremely long distances from countries where its use was still allowed.

Jane Elder, whose passion for the Great Lakes has been at the heart of her long, storied career of environmental activism, became one of the lead advocates in the nation for controlling air toxics, tying the importance of controlling these pollutants to protecting the lakes. These airborne chemicals and metals were not identified among the so called “criteria pollutants” addressed in the Clean Air Act adopted by Congress in 1970. Michigan Chapter members were active participants in lobbying efforts in Congress to require the regulation of air toxics. Chapter staffer Anne Woiwode became part of the Sierra Club Great Lakes team working on air toxics issues, including producing educational information and organizing Michigan volunteers.  Michigan Chapter leaders had engaged in fights against air toxics including dioxins and furans starting with the Detroit Incinerator fight in the mid-1980’s (see article in this blog), and brought that skill and knowledge to the national fight as well. 

In 1990, the Congress adopted amendments to the Clean Air Act that directed the US Environmental Protection Agency and, through delegated authority, state environmental agencies, to move toward the regulation of 189 specific air toxins.  The same law brought about additional controls of Acid Rain causing emissions of sulfur dioxide (read about the Michigan Chapter’s engagement on this issue here https://annewoiwode.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/acid-raid-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-part-1/ ). The fight over how these provisions are implemented has continued since that time, with former Michigan Chapter staffer Alison Horton (now Central Region Organizing Director) among those participating in work groups for setting Michigan’s regulations. Under the Snyder Administration, efforts to weaken air toxics regulations remind us that victories such as these will always demand vigilance.

Great Lakes Water Diversion

With 20 percent of the world’s liquid fresh water in the Great Lakes, the potential threat of diversion of waters out of the Great Lakes basin only became a concern as ideas for diversion began to emerge in the 1980s, including proposals to send water to the drought-stricken southwest United States. Sierra Club’s Great Lakes Program and many volunteers in Michigan and beyond played a role in advocating for an unusual agreement among the eight Great Lakes states and the Provinces of Ontario and Quebec. The Great Lakes Charter signed in 1985 was a common agreement across the basin that laid the base for protection of the quantity of Great Lakes water. Sierra Club members joined with allies across Michigan to lobby then Governor James Blanchard to produce a strong charter and sign it along with the other governors and premiers.

As the importance of protecting the Great Lakes grew in the public perception, additional agreements strengthening the initial charter were adopted. Issues around the bottling of water from sources within Michigan for shipment outside of the basin galvanized efforts to further lock down the provisions for any diversion. In 2005 the Great Lakes–Saint Lawrence River Basin Sustainable Water Resources Agreement among the states and provinces was completed, with a binding implementation document for the states titled the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact enacted by Congress and effective in 2008.  The Compact established a variety of requirements for each state to meet in order to protect the Great Lakes from diversion. Among provisions were requirements for states to develop protocols for monitoring and regulating the consumption of both surface waters within the Great Lakes basin and those ground waters hydrologically connect to the basin.  Sierra Club was joined by Clean Water Action and other organizations to urge the state to adopt strong requirements for water quantity controls, but the legislation adopted contains several loopholes including for the use of water in fracking operations that Great Lakes advocates continue to seek to plug. 

In 2016, the provision of the Compact requiring that any diversion outside of the basin be unanimously approved by all eight governors of the states was tested for the first time. Despite strong evidence of a lack of need, a request to divert water to the city of Waukesha, Wisconsin, approved by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder highlighted the weakness of the Compact provisions.  In a sign that companies are looking to take advantage of a Michigan governor who seems unconcerned about diversion, a proposal to drastically increase the permitted size of a water bottling plant owned by Nestle in Evart was only brought to public attention days before the permit comment period was to close. An enormous outpouring of public concern has led to an extension of the comment period and agreement to hold a hearing. Sierra Club members are engaging in the effort to block this unwarranted expansion.

Drilling for Oil and Gas under Great Lakes Banned

As awareness of the vulnerability of the Great Lakes to pollution grew, attention was drawn to a potential threat of oil and gas drilling on or under the Great Lakes. In fact, Michigan had several oil and gas wells which had been drilled directionally under the bottomlands of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron starting in 1979. Oil and gas rights under the bottomlands of Michigan’s portion of the Great Lakes belong to the state, and in 1997 a lease of 200 acres of oil and gas rights by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources to a Canadian oil development company sparked outrage throughout the state. 

Sierra Club volunteers and staff joined with many partners around the state in the late 1990s/early 2000’s to raise an alarm about the potential for harm in the freshwater ecosystem from this practice. Concerns about the drilling focused on the potential for pockmarking Michigan’s precious coastlines with well-heads and dangers of spills, blowouts or other concerns around these drilling sites. As debate over measures in Michigan’s legislature got underway in earnest, the US Congress placed a moratorium on drilling activities until 2003, sending a strong signal about how unpopular this activity was. In a sign of bipartisanship, the Michigan Legislature passed a legislative ban on leasing any oil and gas under the bottomlands and connecting waterways in 2002, but Governor John Engler declined to sign the bill, and it went into effect without his signature. The ban still stands today.

The Great Lakes and Environmental Justice

Sierra Club’s commitment to protection and restoration of the Great Lakes and addressing environmental injustices has come together in southeastern Michigan over the past decade. Former Great Lakes Program staffer Melissa Damaschke drew a strong connection among a number of important water and pollution issues in Detroit and surrounding communities, and with a cadre of volunteers, developed both advocates and people contributing to solutions. The issues have included: pollution from the Detroit Water and Sewerage District  (now the Great Lakes Water Authority), the largest waste water treatment facility in the United States; access to affordable drinking water; advocating for green infrastructure; and hands-on help for people to address storm water runoff issues at their own homes. Tackling this suite of issues has empowered community members to become powerful advocates for public health and the environment. Michigan Chapter staffers Erma Leaphart and Dorthea Thomas are continuing this work under the Great Lakes Program.

Protecting Against Oil Spills

In July 2010, the largest inland oil spill in United States history occurred near Marshall, MI, as Enbridge Line 6B burst open and dumped approximately one million gallons of heavy, tar sands crude oil into Talmadge Creek, where it flowed into the Kalamazoo River.  Sierra Club was among the first to provide documentation of the severity of the disaster, arranging with a volunteer pilot from Lighthawk and a photographer to obtain the first aerial photographs of the spill. Within a day after the spill was publicly announced, the Michigan Chapter website became a critical source of information about the extent of the spill and the developing plans of the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, which were heading up efforts to contain and clean up. Sierra Club members, particularly in the area of the disaster, have continued to participate in and work with both the agencies and the communities as recovery continues to this day.

This experience motivated Sierra Club and many allied organizations to rally to prevent future disasters in Michigan and elsewhere. Environmental groups learned about existing oil pipelines throughout the region, including the Enbridge Line 5 which crosses the Straits of Mackinac in two pipelines that sit on braces at the bottom of the straits. Chapter Forest Ecologist Marvin Roberson in 2012 noticed that the Huron Manistee National Forest was considering approval of re-issuance of an expired special use permit for Enbridge Line 5 across the forest, with no additional environmental review of consideration. Marvin’s discovery and input led to the Forest Service deciding to conduct a more complete environmental review as part of consideration of the permit. Sierra Club contends that the Forest Service failed to fully assess the environmental impacts, including the impact of the full extent of the line on the environment, but was unable to prevail in court.

In 2012, the National Wildlife Federation released its report, “Sunken Hazard” (http://www.oilandwaterdontmix.org/sunken_hazard) which examined the threats posed by Line 5 where it crosses the Straits. Following that report, a new coalition called Oil and Water Don’t Mix (http://www.oilandwaterdontmix.org/#menu ) was created specifically focused on the huge threat posed to the Great Lakes ecosystem by the more than 60-year-old pipeline as it crosses the Straits. Chapter Chair David Holtz has been central to the OWDM campaign throughout, and plays a critical role on strategy and communications. Additional reports by NWF and For Love of Water (FLOW) have continued to detail the dangers posed by the aging pipelines. Working within OWDM, Sierra Club has joined in working to pressure Michigan’s Governor Snyder and Attorney General Bill Schuette to take action available to them to enforce easement provisions to shut down the flow of oil through the pipeline.