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.
