Remove waste burning from Tonko’s clean-energy bill

In March, Rep. Paul Tonko introduced the CLEAN Future Act to address the climate crisis alongside Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey. In addition to providing federal subsidies for clean energy, the CLEAN Future Act includes some strong, urgently needed strategies to reduce waste at the source, including a national bottle bill and a moratorium on federal permits for new plastics facilities, which I wholeheartedly support. However, there is a poison pill in this legislation that we cannot afford to overlook.

The bill’s definition of the kinds of “clean energy” that would qualify for federal subsidies includes fossil fuels and the incineration of “post-recycled municipal waste,” food waste, lawn trimmings, and construction debris.

As Tonko — chair of the House Environment and Climate Change Subcommittee — should know, clean energy does not come with a smokestack. Burning trash, food waste (which should be composted), and construction debris generates large amounts of heavy metals, toxic air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions.

For example, Wheelabrator’s “waste-to-energy” incinerator in Maryland is the single largest source of air pollution in the city of Baltimore. And Wheelabrator’s “waste-to-energy” plant in Hudson Falls burns 500 tons of trash every day, producing nearly half a million tons of toxic ash per year, which the company tried to landfill in an abandoned quarry next to the Hudson River.

Incinerators, toxic ash dumps, and landfills are almost entirely located in low-income communities and communities of color — a clear and egregious example of environmental injustice. Case in point: the Albany ANSWERS trash incinerator, which contributed to serious health problems in Albany’s Sheridan Hollow and Arbor Hill neighborhoods by burning 350 tons of trash every day for 12 years. ANSWERS was only shut down after winds blew emissions from the plant over to the governor’s mansion in 1994. Arbor Hill is in Tonko’s congressional district. How can he ignore that example of environmental racism and introduce a bill that provides taxpayer money to incentivize garbage incinerators?

Incinerators like Wheelabrator and Covanta continue to lobby Congress to try to secure the kind of federal funding Tonko has included in the CLEAN Future Act. But here in the Capital Region we know firsthand from our experiences with Nor-lite, Lafarge, and ANSWERS that burning waste isn’t an acceptable “solution” to our growing plastic pollution and solid waste problems, and certainly not to our climate change woes. These highly polluting, expensive behemoths exacerbate environmental injustice, threaten our health, lower home values, send air pollution throughout the region, and decrease residents’ overall quality of life.

Led by volunteers from PAUSE, Food & Water Watch, and Beyond Plastics, Tonko’s constituents have begun holding weekly “Tonko Tuesdays” rallies outside his office at 19 Dove St. in downtown Albany to protest the inclusion of incineration and fossil fuel subsidies in the CLEAN Future Act. In a July 6 Zoom call that I participated in with the congressman, 30 of his constituents urged him to remove waste burning from the bill. In response, he attempted to minimize this inclusion, calling it “just one page in a thousand.”

Regardless of the word count, Tonko’s constituents are making it clear that we do not consider this a climate solution, nor do we want to open the door to taxpayer funding for burning trash that makes us sicker.

Ironically, the Tonko Tuesday events take place in the shadows of the Albany ANSWERS incinerator. As the saying goes, those who don’t learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.