Rush to Burn: Solving America'S Garbage Crisis?

By Newsday Inc.

One day in March 1987, a barge from Islip, Long Island was evicted from Morehead City, North Carolina, after trying to unload the mountains of trash on its decks. More than five months from the time it began its trip, the unwelcome barge, and it's 3,186 tons of commercial garbage, became the cornerstone of an astonishing news investigation that revealed a country unable to cope with its mounting garbage crisis.

Newsday reporters were the first to locate the barge, the Mobro 4000 as it drifted aimlessly off the shore of Long Island. They were also first to explore and explain the problems and issues that barge had come to symbolize. The results of their investigation are presented in this book. Winner of the Worth Bingham Award, the Page One Award for Crusading Journalism, and the New York State Associated Press Award for In-Depth Reporting, Rush to Burn explains the reasons why we, as a throw-away society, are suffocating in our own trash. It also explains why communities, in desperation, are turning to incineration, the riskiest form of garbage disposal yet developed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Apr 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781610913201

Book preview

DIRECTORS

PREFACE

BY ANTHONY J. MARRO

Editor, Newsday

One day in March 1987, Rex Smith, then a Long Island reporter and more recently Newsday’s Albany bureau chief, called the office to pass along a tip he had picked up while working his beat. A barge carrying trash from Islip, Long Island, had just been kicked out of Morehead City, North Carolina, where it had tried to unload, and was drifting around, looking for a new place to dock.

The barge, as the world came to know, was called the Mobro 4000. It was being towed by a tugboat named Break of Dawn that was commanded by Capt. Duffy St. Pierre. Before its odyssey ended, it had wandered about for 164 days, its 3,186 tons of commercial garbage spurned by officials in North Carolina, Louisiana, Florida, Mexico, Belize, and the Bahamas, as well as by the small town of Sardinia, in upstate New York.

In virtually every port, it was met by officials with court orders and by throngs of reporters. It became the subject both of joke and controversy, of litigation and accusation, and of a fierce public debate that fell somewhere below the level of The Federalist Papers.

If she wants to get porky about it, we’ll identify how much of it is hers and we’ll leave it on the dock for her, said Frank Jones, the Islip Town supervisor. This was after Queens Borough President Claire Shulman refused to let the barge unload in Long Island City.

He’s an idiot, Shulman replied.

Like most papers, Newsday chased the barge and the story, with Shirley Perlman acting as lead reporter. Perlman was the first reporter to locate the barge, spent more time with it than any other reporter, and was on board the tug Break of Dawn when it finally passed under the Verrazano Bridge on its return to New York.

The day before, trying to locate the tug and the barge in a storm, the boat that had been chartered by Perlman and a photographer was on its way back to the New Jersey shore when Perlman—who had been monitoring Channel 16 on the marine radio—suddenly heard St. Pierre’s voice.

What are you doing here? he asked, when she broke in on his conversation.

Where you go, I go, kid, she said. I’m following you to New York.

By the time Perlman returned to Newsday, the Garbage Project, as it came to be called, had been launched—a major effort to explore and explain all the problems and issues that lay behind the crisis that the garbage barge had come to symbolize. From a small group built around two reporters (Tom Maier and Mark McIntyre), a photographer (Audrey Tiernan), and an editor (Joe Demma), the project team grew to seven, then a dozen, and then more. Reporters were drawn from the Long Island and New York staffs, from the Washington Bureau, from Newsday bureaus in Mexico, London, and Tokyo. Toward the end, there were about 25 people involved in the project, working in a separate office, without windows or clocks, set apart from the main news room.

Questionnaires were sent to more than 200 incinerator plant operators and builders, and to officials in every state; the results then were fed into a computer for analysis. The team did a computer study of campaign contributions from the garbage industry to public officials. It crafted a massive Freedom of Information Act request, to all Long Island towns, to New York City, and to the federal government, to obtain information about consultant contracts. It then hired a consultant of its own to do a study of the environmental impact statements for all planned incinerators in the region.

As the project moved along, the large room housing the team itself took on some aspects of a landfill—a cluttered and surely unsanitary workplace, where desks were piled high with memos and reports, where files were jammed with documents on the workings of electrostatic precipitators and reverse-reciprocating stoker grates, where the walls were covered with pictures of the garbage barge and lists of states ranked by different kinds of garbage production.

It also became the scene of the sorts of loud, sometimes angry debates that inevitably take place when (as someone once said of news magazine—type group journalism) many minds are brought to bear on a defenseless set of facts.

The room became known as the Garbage Room.

The team became known as the Garbage People.

Many life changes occurred during the six months they worked together. One reporter left Newsday for a job on the West Coast but said the move was unrelated to the project. Two reporters became engaged, but not to each other. And one reporter became a father.

The reporters found a throwaway society suffocating in its own trash and trapped without easy solutions. In desperation, more and more communities are turning to an answer that may be the riskiest yet: a new generation of garbage-burning plants.

Here is a summary of Newsday’s findings:

The United States is spending more than $17 billion on incineration as a solution to the garbage problem. It is a national investment that could mean trading one kind of pollution for another while burdening taxpayers with enormous costs. Officials are buying incinerators in a crisis atmosphere and in ways that close off such alternatives as recycling.

Americans are running out of space to bury the 230 million tons of garbage they produce every year. Thousands of landfills are closing, and in many areas new sites cannot be found because of environmental concerns and local opposition.

The shortage of dump space in the Northeast has given birth to a new, unregulated industry that trucks 10 million tons of garbage a year to far-flung landfills, spreading pollution into the Midwest, raising health concerns, and costing taxpayers $1 billion a year.

After nearly 20 years of cost overruns and plant failures, the incinerator industry is promoting a costly technology that many experts fear could be an equally risky gamble. The industry has little experience with the technology it is importing from Europe and has yet to demonstrate a long-term record of success.

Builders of garbage-to-energy plants have downplayed and in some cases ignored the health risks that can result from fumes and ash. While debate continues over the dangers of ash, state officials allowed 30,000 tons of the waste to be spread under newly surfaced roads and parking lots on Long Island.

Consultants with a vested interest in incineration have played a key role in shaping the nation’s garbage policy—and have shared in the industry’s profits. Many are former government officials who have gone to work for the industry. In the New York City and Long Island region alone, consultants and lawyers have reaped $46 million in fees.

As the nation’s garbage problem grew to crisis proportions, federal and state governments left municipal officials alone to deal with the environmental and technological challenges. Their inaction stifled efforts to encourage recycling and to cut the amount of waste Americans generate. At the same time, the federal government granted generous tax benefits to backers and operators of incinerators and required utilities to buy power from them.

Hempstead Town has awarded garbage contracts worth more than $1 billion to a politically connected company that has convictions for bid-rigging and price-fixing and has never built an incinerator.

New York City is trying to cope with a record increase in its daily garbage heap and a wave of illegal dumping. The city is moving to erect five major garbage-burning plants at a cost of at least $2 billion, but some experts question whether it is a wise investment.

Recycling programs have generally failed to capture the government’s attention and the nation’s commitment. State and local officials are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in building incinerators and a fraction of that in encouraging recycling.

The result of the reporters’ work is found in the 10-part, 55,000-word series that is being reprinted here. In the old who-what-where-when-and-why school of journalism, the why came last and sometimes was not dealt with at all. The larger and more complicated the story, the less likely it was to be answered. For many weeks, Newsday and other papers tracked the who, the what, the where, and the when of the garbage barge story.

This is our effort to explain the why.

PART I

GARBAGE WORLD

CHAPTER 1

HIGH-STAKE RISK ON INCINERATORS

BY RICHARD C. FIRSTMAN

Across America, they rise mysteriously from the edge of town: mighty, windowless structures of concrete and steel with soaring smokestacks and furnaces that can melt a plastic soda bottle in a tenth of a second. In municipal America’s war on trash, they are the strategic weapon of choice: garbage-eating, energy-producing incineration plants.

In a country that produces more garbage than any other on the planet, a nation of dwindling environmental options, they represent one of the biggest collaborations of public works and private industry in American history. Hundreds of waste-to-energy plants are being operated, constructed, or planned at a cost of more than $17 billion.

But a six-month investigation has found that officials are being pressured into a solution that may be a massive environmental and economic gamble, a national experiment that could mean trading one kind of pollution for another while burdening taxpayers with enormous long-term costs. The inquiry found that the nation’s garbage-incineration industry has been plagued by mechanical failures that have already closed $720 million worth of incinerators and caused unscheduled shutdowns at more than half the plants now operating nationwide.

The industry is trying to recoup by selling a European technology that has virtually no operating history in this country and may not work over the long haul because of critical differences between American and European garbage.

And America is buying what the industry is selling. In the Long Island–New York City region alone, nine incinerators are due to go into operation by 1992, at a total cost of more than $2 billion.

But in many ways, the industry has not yet shown it can live up to its promise of clean, efficient waste disposal. Newsday’s examination shows a consistent gap between the rhetoric of its promoters and the reality of its performance.

The industry’s advocates cultivate an image of smoothly functioning machines that gobble up garbage and churn out electricity. They promise an alternative to overflowing dumps that threaten to poison water supplies.

The reality is different:

The new incinerators are expensive and often unreliable.

They are being subsidized by utility ratepayers whose garbage may never go to the plants.

They contribute to air pollution and create huge quantities of toxic ash—without eliminating the need for landfills.

They undermine such cleaner and cheaper approaches as recycling. In some cases, they make it impossible.

And while the industry promotes the technology as proven, most companies selling plants in the United States have little experience building and operating them. Four of the industry’s ten leading firms have never built an incineration plant of any kind; two others have built only one each.

Incinerators play a major role in garbage disposal around the world, and most experts are convinced that they are part of the solution to America’s trash problem. But, in many cases, they are being sold as the only solution. They are being built with little regard for financial consequences. And they are being opened as environmental questions remain unresolved.

With garbage piling up, city councils and town boards—forced to make crucial decisions as their landfills run out of space—are getting virtually no help from higher levels of government. Newsday ’s study found that, in the Reagan era of passive regulation, the federal government has neglected serious questions of pollution—questions about the toxins in the invisible fumes that fly out of incinerator smokestacks and in the gritty, gray ash that comes out the plants’ back ends.

The momentum of the incineration movement alarms the industry’s most vocal adversaries. My worst fear is that it will be a colossal public health and financial disaster, a mistake perhaps unparalleled in recent decades, says Walter Hang, who leads an environmental arm of the New York Public Interest Research Group. We will create a whole new class of toxic dumps for the ash and we will exacerbate the air quality that federal authorities have already said is a health hazard on Long Island and New York City.

The EPA’s inaction has been part of a larger abdication by federal and state governments in dealing with the garbage crisis.

At a time when local governments were making crucial decisions about incinerators that would serve into the next century—for many officials, the most important decisions they would ever make in government—the EPA’s solid-waste-policy staff was cut from 128 employees to one.

This failure to lead has left a vacuum that is quickly being filled by private industry: incinerator manufacturers and their allies—consultants, investment bankers, lawyers, and influential former government officials who have shared in the lucrative business of resource recovery. In the region, municipalities have paid these advisers more than $46 million.

Incinerator operators contend that, like any new technology, the industry has suffered through an inevitable period of trial and error. They dismiss the suggestion that the plants cannot work in this country.

We’re offering mature plants, says David Sussman, environmental director of Ogden Martin Systems, a large incinerator manufacturer. It’s like driving home a BMW—when you get home you know it’s going to work. I’ve heard all these arguments: the garbage is different, the operators are different, the environment is different. But none of it is true. What you’ve got out there is the future.

The future comes at a time when Northeastern garbage is being trucked to the American heartland as landfills across the country close at a rate of ten a week.

So much garbage has been shipped off Long Island that, on average, a tractor-trailer carrying 40,000 pounds of trash would enter the Long Island Expressway every six and a half minutes. Garbage has been the Island’s leading export by weight—surpassing ducks, clams, and potatoes.

The future was heralded in spring, 1987, when a barge full of Long Island garbage sailed the Atlantic Coast in search of a friendly port. Four states and three foreign countries refused it entry.

As the barge floated in New York Harbor, and lawyers and politicians debated its fate in court, Newsday began looking into the crisis it had come to symbolize.

Over the next six months, reporters reviewed tens of thousands of pages of documents, interviewed more than 500 people, toured garbage plants across the country, and surveyed operators of 227 incineration plants and environmental officials in 55 states, 5 territories, and the District of Columbia. What they found was a mundane municipal enterprise that had taken on a life of its own.

We are in the midst of a garbage revolution, says David Gatton, director of policy analysis for the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ resource recovery association. For the first time, this country is realizing that garbage is coming above ground. If we don’t implement solutions quickly we will definitely have a national crisis.

If it is a crisis, it is one that has been building for 50 years—the product of a disposable, over-packaged society. It is a society that has never dealt with its growing production of garbage, never embraced the idea of recycling, and now finds itself starting to suffocate in its own trash.

Two solutions have already failed. First, the early incinerators polluted the air. Then, landfills overflowed and threatened groundwater. In desperation, communities have begun shipping their garbage hundreds of miles—only to find that long-distance trucking is expensive and exports pollution as well as garbage.

As the circle closes, the country now turns to the latest answer: a solution that may create as many problems as it purports to solve.

Welcome to Garbage World.

For your plastic bag of garbage, it is a world of infinite possibilities. It may be trucked to your neighborhood landfill, to be buried perilously close to the source of your drinking water. It may be carted to Ohio or Pennsylvania in the same trailers that will return east with crates of Midwestern produce. It may be shipped to Staten Island, where the garbage mountains of Fresh Kills are growing at a rate that, by the turn of the century, will make the largest town dump in the world one of the highest points on the Eastern Seaboard. Or, your plastic bag of garbage may see the world, piled onto a barge to nowhere.

Garbage World is the municipal equivalent of the federal deficit: How long can it continue, how far can it go? Across America, nervous politicians are caught between conflicting commercial and political interests, and between converging realities: landfills posing environmental hazards as they creep closer to capacity, and a throwaway society that offers no indications that it will suddenly begin throwing away less.

In this atmosphere of crisis, a kind of municipal-industrial complex is in the midst of a mad, perhaps misguided, dash for salvation. It is called resource recovery—a euphemism that implies environmental virtue but that tends to obscure persistent questions of safety, competence, economics, and the environment itself.

A couple that for a while had their names in the news as often as film stars—the barge Mobro 4000 and its tug, the Break of Dawn.

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On Long Island and in New York City, the concentration of nine plants due to open by 1992 and four others in the planning stages—nearly one for every town in Nassau and Suffolk and every borough of the city—raises questions about environmental effects.

They are the new incinerators: sleek concrete structures that could be I.M. Pei works with smokestacks. They seem logical—hundreds of tons of garbage burned every day, turned almost magically into kilowatts of energy. These new mass-burn plants, in which truckloads of unsorted garbage are fed into furnaces that boil water that produces steam that turns turbines that produce electricity, would seem to be the perfect solution to the puzzle of American garbology. And municipal America likes the idea: By 1992, there are expected to be more than 200 garbage-burning plants in this country.

But it is an idea advanced by an industry that often has been better at selling incinerators than at operating them. Although the technology is fallible, the operators inexperienced, and the result potentially dangerous, garbage-to-energy plants are sprouting across the American landscape like so many 7-Elevens. There are now more than 100 plants operating in the United States, with another 115 under construction or development and scores of others being discussed—a national investment, thus far, of more than $17 billion, a figure that could nearly double by the turn of the century.

It is not hard to understand why municipalities are practically lining up to buy incinerators. Nearly 3,000 municipal landfills have closed since 1982 because they were either filled or environmentally dangerous. And half the remaining 8,736 landfills are expected to run out of room by 1997. As the American way of garbage approaches a critical mass, local officials feel pressured to do something. While incinerators may represent a trade-off, it is a gamble many seem willing to take.

In Huntington we had no more space for landfilling. Same in Islip and in Nassau County, said Huntington Supervisor John O’Neil, whose town has signed a contract for a new incineration plant. "How far into the future can we do