State orders review of facility

Prattsville

A company attempting to construct a new kind of waste processing facility in the central Catskills must formulate an elaborate plan to study and minimize its potential environmental impacts, the state determined Wednesday.

Hughes Energy wants to build a 115,000-square-foot plant it says will help New York reach its climate goals by annually converting 176,000 tons of sorted garbage into a fibrous material that could replace paper products and coal. The process would cut down on methane, a greenhouse gas produced by rotting organic material, by diverting trash from landfills and turning it into reusable products, according to Hughes.

But environmental groups and residents have pushed back on the plan with increasing vigor, arguing there are too many unknowns with the new technology and worrying about the plant’s impact on the Catskills Mountains and the New York City reservoir system. The plant would be located less than 2,000 feet from the Schoharie Creek, which feeds into the Ashokan Reservoir that provides water to most of NYC and about 1 million people in the Hudson Valley.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation, which is in charge of vetting the project, is now requiring Hughes Energy to study and plan how to minimize potentially significant adverse environmental impacts, including on water resources, noise, odor, traffic, and public infrastructure.

Hughes Energy would have preferred it not to be this way. When the DEC set the review process in motion Sept. 20 by declaring the project had the potential for significant environmental impacts, it listed potential impacts on noise, odor, water resources and traffic in their letter to Hughes.

Hughes then had to prepare a “scoping” document laying out how it planned to study and minimize these potential impacts. The scoping document, released Oct. 1, stated there would be no significant negative impacts on odor, water resources or traffic, and the only issue Hughes felt it needed to address was the plant’s impacts on noise.

The public had 60 days to comment on this document, and the DEC received more than 750 written submissions. After demands from environmental groups and “hundreds” of letter writers to extend the comment period, the DEC requested adding 30 days, but Hughes Energy declined the request, according to the DEC.

On Wednesday, the DEC released its own scoping document, declaring Hughes must address all four potential impacts the agency originally identified, and adding a fifth — the potential impact on public infrastructure, such as utilities, emergency medical services and open space.

Hughes Energy CEO Dane McSpedon said Thursday the company had argued some of the potential impacts would not be significant enough to mandate study, such as the impact the project would have on traffic, but he had “no issue” with the DEC’s plan.

When asked why Hughes denied the DEC’s request to extend the public comment period, Hughes said the company had already been thorough in listening to the community.

“Our position is we’ve been engaging the community since January 2020, and we’ve participated in a number of voluntary meetings and laid everything out … nothing’s changed in what we’re offering or what we’re suggesting, so we just felt that enough time had already been provided to the community, and we didn’t see any benefit to anyone in providing additional time,” he said.

McSpedon and other principals at Hughes Energy voluntarily held two public information sessions last summer in the communities the plant would abut, laying out their plans and taking questions from combative locals.

The regional environmental group Riverkeeper applauded the DEC’s decision to have Hughes address the five potential impacts.

“Riverkeeper is pleased with the comprehensive final scope issued by DEC, which rebuffs Hughes’ feeble attempt to evade its [environmental review] responsibilities. We hope DEC will remain committed to a meaningful assessment of all environmental impacts, and we will continue to monitor its efforts on this proposal,” according to a statement by the group.

Riverkeeper has been joined by the environmental group Catskill Mountainkeeper and the citizens’ group Don’t Trash the Catskills in scrutinizing the project.

Catskill Mountainkeeper Associate Director Wes Gillingham said he was “pretty happy” with the DEC’s plan, especially the detail demanded with regard to potential impacts on water resources.

The DEC requires Hughes to study the potential impact on the Schoharie Creek, as well as the water supplies of surrounding municipalities and residents.

One of the most significant items Hughes Energy must now produce for the DEC is a full life cycle assessment, which calculates the effects of the project on greenhouse gases, “including upstream and downstream emissions,” according to the DEC.

This includes studying the effects of the plant’s eventual products, such as the fuel pellets meant to replace coal. Hughes must calculate what impact burning the pellets will have on greenhouse gas concentrations when weighed against burning coal, according to the DEC.

McSpedon has said a full LCA was prepared in concert with the British government when the technology was being developed there, but that the information is proprietary.

Gillingham also worried about the public health effects of burning the pellets, expressing skepticism all plastics and hazardous material could be removed at the proposed plant.

The waste received by the plant would initially come from transfer stations, which remove recyclables and large objects from unsorted garbage. The waste would be trucked to the plant, where workers would remove other hazardous materials before loading it into giant autoclaves, according to Hughes.

This waste, which would still be 16 percent plastic, would be heated in the autoclaves to 250 degrees and pressurized, causing plastics to shrink and coagulate together, or “deform into globular shapes,” according to Hughes’ solid waste permit application. The autoclaves turn the organic materials into a fibrous mush, and sorting machines cull out the other materials, such as metal, cloth and the plastics, which are recycled elsewhere.

The mush would then be dried and could be used to replace paper, coal or wood pellets.

This would be the first time the technology was used in the U.S. The technology has used been experimentally at at least two sites in England and Ireland.