Washington, DC's History with Waste Incineration

1972 to 1994: DC’s old trash incin­er­a­tor oper­at­ed in Ben­ning Road neigh­bor­hood in Ward 7, a low-income Black com­mu­ni­ty where oth­er envi­ron­men­tal­ly harm­ful facil­i­ties have been con­cen­trat­ed, one of the city’s two trash trans­fer sta­tions (which had a fire in 2022 and is being rebuilt), an oil-fired pow­er plant (closed in 2012) that left behind a con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed site that is spread­ing under­ground into the neigh­bor­hood, and a Super­fund tox­ic waste site near pub­lic hous­ing where incin­er­a­tor ash and oth­er wastes were dumped years ago.

2004–2009: All 14 bids when land­fills were allowed to com­pete for DC’s trash came in cheap­er than using the Cov­an­ta Fair­fax incin­er­a­tor in Lor­ton, VA.

Cov­an­ta Fair­fax is the 3rd largest incin­er­a­tor in the nation and the largest indus­tri­al air pol­luter with­in at least 25 miles of DC. How­ev­er, DPW kept sign­ing con­tracts to use Cov­an­ta. Back­ground in this arti­cle on DC’s waste and envi­ron­men­tal racism.

2013: DC DPW looks at build­ing a new trash incin­er­a­tor in the Dis­trict. Oppo­si­tion from Ener­gy Jus­tice Net­work, Sier­ra Club, and oth­ers kills that idea early.

Dur­ing that explo­ration, then DPW Direc­tor How­land (who used to work for Fair­fax Coun­ty), had expressed that DC should­n’t be giv­ing mon­ey to dis­pose of waste at Cov­an­ta Fair­fax if the city can own its own incin­er­a­tor with­in its bor­ders, and get mon­ey from import­ing waste from out­side of the Dis­trict. It became clear that the only fea­si­ble site being con­sid­ered was to reuse the Ben­ning Road site, which made it an envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice issue.

3/18/2013: Coun­cilmem­ber Mary Cheh chaired the Com­mit­tee on Trans­porta­tion and the Envi­ron­men­t’s Pub­lic Over­sight Hear­ing on the “Study of a Waste-to-Ener­gy Facil­i­ty in the Dis­trict.” See video.

In that hear­ing, the spokesper­son for the incin­er­a­tor indus­try’s trade asso­ci­a­tion admit­ted on the record that Mike Ewall from Ener­gy Jus­tice Net­work was cor­rect about incin­er­a­tion gen­er­al­ly being more expen­sive than land­fill­ing [at 1:44 in video] and incin­er­a­tion being dirt­i­er than coal pow­er plants [1:46]. Cheh remarked [2:04] “…there’s going to be a sub­stan­tial invest­ment… not to men­tion the polit­i­cal issue about where such a facil­i­ty would be locat­ed in the Dis­trict. I’ve already decid­ed it won’t be in Ward 3. Kid­ding.” While she claimed to be jok­ing, it’s clear that the city’s wealth­i­est and whitest ward would nev­er be cho­sen for a new incin­er­a­tor. In two years, on behalf of the admin­is­tra­tion, Cheh intro­duced the bill to enter into the con­tract to keep burn­ing DC’s trash in the com­mu­ni­ty of col­or in Lor­ton, VA for anoth­er 6–11 years, though she lat­er came to object to this con­tract (more below).

2015: DC DPW put togeth­er a request for pro­pos­als (RFP) that did not allow land­fills to com­pete. Only trash incin­er­a­tors with­in 50 miles of DC’s two trans­fer sta­tions were per­mit­ted to bid. There are four of them. The only one in a white com­mu­ni­ty is in Mont­gomery Coun­ty and DPW knew well that they do not accept out-of-coun­ty waste, so it was a vio­la­tion of the Civ­il Rights Act to even rig the RFP this way. The incin­er­a­tors in Alexan­dria and Bal­ti­more did­n’t have the extra capac­i­ty, so Cov­an­ta Fair­fax was the only bid­der and got the con­tract, as the RFP was designed to do. It was a 5?year con­tract with two 3?year renew­al options. 21 groups opposed the con­tract, but it was approved, any­way. More on our oppo­si­tion at the time here: http://www.energyjustice.net/dc/wastecontract

2017: Two months after a major waste pile fire at the Cov­an­ta-run incin­er­a­tor in Mont­gomery Coun­ty, MD which burned for near­ly two weeks, the same hap­pened at Cov­an­ta Fair­fax, caus­ing much more dam­age. Three sto­ries of trash burned uncon­trolled for near­ly two weeks and caused about $40 mil­lion in dam­age to the plant, shut­ting it down from 2/2/2017 until the very end of the year. Find some pic­tures of that here.

2017: We com­mis­sioned pub­lished econ­o­mist and life cycle assess­ment (LCA) expert, Dr. Jef­frey Mor­ris, to use his “MEB­Calc“ mod­el to ana­lyze incin­er­a­tion vs. land­fill­ing for DC. The Mea­sur­ing Envi­ron­men­tal Ben­e­fits Cal­cu­la­tor (MEB­Calc) eval­u­ates nine dif­fer­ent health and envi­ron­men­tal impacts and is able to add them up using a mon­e­tized impact total to show all of the impacts on one chart. It’s the most com­pre­hen­sive LCA tool for eval­u­at­ing waste sys­tems. The mod­el showed incin­er­a­tion at Cov­an­ta to be far worse than land­fill­ing when look­ing at the nine health and envi­ron­men­tal cri­te­ria, includ­ing trans­porta­tion impacts. Mike Ewall pre­sent­ed this to DPW that sum­mer. Slides 61–85 in our incin­er­a­tion slide deck has the results. In gath­er­ing data for this, Mike spoke to land­fill man­agers at four south­east­ern VA land­fills to get land­fill gas cap­ture rate data, and asked them all if they thought they could beat Cov­an­ta’s price if they were offered a con­tract with the same 5–11 year term, despite the greater haul­ing dis­tance. All indi­cat­ed that they could.

[Note: a more detailed 2021 report on the Cov­an­ta incin­er­a­tor in Mary­land, done for Coun­ty Exec­u­tive of Mont­gomery Coun­ty, using updat­ed method­ol­o­gy and more help­ful sum­ma­ry charts, found that incin­er­a­tion is twice as harm­ful for the cli­mate as land­fill­ing at more dis­tant land­fills in PA, and was 3.2 times as bad when fac­tor­ing in oth­er health and envi­ron­men­tal cri­te­ria. That can be found at http://www.energyjustice.net/md/moco]

2018: In the wake of the incin­er­a­tor clo­sure in 2017, and argu­ments between DC and Cov­an­ta on who will pay for the diver­sion of waste to South­east­ern VA land­fills dur­ing those 11 months, City Coun­cil Envi­ron­ment and Trans­porta­tion Com­mit­tee Chair, Mary Cheh, in DPW over­sight hear­ings, asked DPW to do an analy­sis of incin­er­a­tion vs. land­fill­ing (not real­iz­ing we had just done that). DPW promised to do so, and also com­mit­ted to issue a Request for Infor­ma­tion into the prices of going direct to land­fill. DPW nev­er did the lat­ter and took until 2021 to do the analysis.

10/4/2022: 274 orga­ni­za­tions sup­port­ed a let­ter we wrote to the White House Coun­cil on Envi­ron­men­tal Qual­i­ty urg­ing them to lean on EPA to address numer­ous pro-incin­er­a­tion poli­cies includ­ing the bias­es in their WARM model.

11/7/2022 In a Trans­porta­tion & Envi­ron­ment Com­mit­tee hear­ing on Zero Waste, DPW states that they’re mov­ing away from incineration:

Coun­cilmem­ber Cheh: “I want to turn to prob­a­bly back to you, direc­tor, the incin­er­a­tor and recy­clables con­tract. We approved a one-year exten­sion for the waste to take us through the end of 2022, and I moved the leg­is­la­tion, I did it with some reser­va­tion as there’s a num­ber of com­pelling objec­tions to incin­er­a­tion, and to con­tin­ue our con­ver­sa­tion in par­tic­u­lar. So, I’d like to know, now that this con­tract exten­sion is com­ing to a close, what’s DPW’s plan to move forward?”

DPW Direc­tor Carter: “Our plan mov­ing for­ward is to work to take as much of that waste to local land­fills with incin­er­a­tion not being a viable alter­na­tive. I’m work­ing with my staff and with pro­cure­ment to see how we could expe­dite that process.”

See the video.

In a DPW stake­hold­er meet­ing short­ly after this, DPW’s Blake Adams denies that they are aim­ing to move away from incin­er­a­tion. Both Direc­tor Carter and Blake Adams have left their posi­tions in the past few months for dif­fer­ent reasons.

Since Cheh’s 2020 let­ter, DC City Coun­cil has refused to move for­ward 3?year con­tract exten­sions with Cov­an­ta, and they’ve been on 1?year exten­sions so far.