A new incinerator to burn waste in Miami-Dade is a toxic proposal | Opinion
Trash. It’s not a sexy topic but it affects our health, pocketbooks, environment and climate future. We should all be paying attention.
Recently, the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners, in a sudden action with no prior public notice, voted to locate a new $1.5 billion trash incineration plant in Doral, despite fervent community opposition.
This was a blow to Doral residents, like me, who for years have been battling noxious odors and a slew of toxic air pollutants from the current incinerator — known as a waste-to-energy facility — in our city. The County Commission made the decision in a surprise vote at a meeting in July, undermining Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s request for public outreach on where to site the new facility.
The current incinerator is run by a company called Covanta, which has touted its incinerators as the sustainable alternative to dumping waste in landfills, while pushing a false narrative that electricity from burning trash is a form of “clean energy.” Incineration is by no means a sustainable or clean process. In fact, incineration is the most emissions-intensive form of electricity generation in the United States today. When solid waste is burned in an incinerator, it doesn’t disappear. Instead, it is converted into toxic ash and air pollution containing volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, arsenic and other pollutants that can cause a host of health impacts, including respiratory illness, miscarriages, cancer and even death. Although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is required to update incinerator pollution limits every five years, it has not done so in 15 years.
Doral’s odor-complaint log has registered thousands of complaints over the years, with many directly referencing the incinerator and describing symptoms such as headaches, nausea and burning eyes and throats. And these are just the immediate symptoms; I worry what long-term health effects on my community will be uncovered over time. The ash byproduct from burning — dumped in a landfill or used in concrete to build roads — also blows onto cars and homes nearby.
The county should not ignore the environmental injustices of a new incinerator in Doral: 93% of people who live within three miles of Covanta’s Doral incinerator are minorities, and 36% live below the poverty line. We are an overburdened community, with diesel trucks to and from the incinerator, three major highways, the Medley Landfill and the Miami-Dade International Airport all in the vicinity.
From an economic stance, it makes little sense to continue operating the Covanta plant or to replace it with another incinerator. The sale of electricity generated by the incinerator has not come close to covering its operating costs, much less generating a profit for Miami-Dade County.
From 2010-2020, the incinerator cost an average of $58.7 million annually to operate, while it only generated an average of $17.2 million annually in electricity sales, dipping as low as $8.2 million in 2020. Continuing to invest in the trash-burning industry is a bad deal for taxpayers. The county estimated that costs to upgrade and modernize the existing incinerator could cost $300 million, while the cost of replacing it with a new one runs over $1 billion.
Not only is the incinerator a terrible use of taxpayer money, building a new one would also foreclose truly sustainable alternatives to incineration and landfilling, since contracts with facility operators like Covanta are for decades at a time.
This is a pivotal opportunity for Miami-Dade County to ditch dirty, expensive incinerator plants and adopt an equitable, cost-effective Zero Waste strategy. Cities across the country, including Austin, Texas; Boulder, Colorado; and San Francisco have provided a road map we can follow, setting ambitious zero-waste goals and diverting large percentages of their waste from landfills and incinerators to recycling and composting facilities. Education and outreach initiatives like a free Smart Gardening Workshop to learn composting techniques and how-to materials with lots of images, translated into different languages, support the necessary cultural shift toward a more sustainable future.
A diverse and dynamic county like Miami-Dade is excellently suited to lead our state with zero-waste strategies. In fact, a study by the University of Florida found that over 50% of the County’s residential waste stream could be composted or recycled.
Opponents of zero waste may claim that composting is problematic because it produces a high amount of methane, a greenhouse gas that accelerates climate change. That is not the case — composting produces a fraction of the methane produced by landfilling, without any of the toxic cocktail of air pollutants produced by burning trash.
Our leaders have a responsibility to promote truly clean, renewable energy sources on the one hand, and more sustainable, zero-waste systems on the other. In the years-long road ahead for the county to find funding and obtain permits for this proposed new incinerator, one thing is for certain: The Doral community, environmental groups and climate-justice advocates will be engaged.
Nestor Perez is an attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization, and a resident of Doral.
