In Your Backyard

By Lucy Corlett

There are three incinerators in the Philadelphia area: Covanta Plymouth Meeting, Covanta Camden, and Covanta Delaware Valley.

The first of these facilities that I was able to visit was Covanta Plymouth Meeting. All Covanta facilities encourage curious (or concerned) parties to tour their facilities, so it was easy for me to arrange a tour for myself and my fellow research intern. Our tour was lead by Darel, who is the Facility Safety Coordinator at the Plymouth Meeting incinerator, and his environmental intern, Rachel. Our visit with them started with an extensive presentation on Covanta’s history, policies, and practices that basically hammered home three main points:

1. Covanta cares about its neighboring communities.
2. Covanta’s annual emission rates come in way below legal limits.
3. Incineration is less polluting than coal power plants and landfills.
4. Covanta’s facilities are not incinerators, they are Energy-from-Waste facilities.

The tour was extremely pleasant and informative (and hot and smelly), marred only by a few tense moments when we asked about the facility’s emissions or safety practices. And boy, it was hot. And smelly. At the tipping floor (where garbage trucks dump waste to be transferred to the furnace by an enormous claw), near the furnace, outside the building. Everywhere, it smelled and burned.

Both Darel and Rachel stressed, somewhat unspecifically, that the incinerator is constantly being “environmentally monitored” and is held to the highest emission standards -- a claim undermined by Darel’s inability to remember the name of an agency that ended up being the EPA. Our guides seemed to firmly believe in incineration as not only a desirable waste management system but also a sustainable source of energy. It was clear that they cared deeply about the health and safety of workers, the surrounding community, and the environment, and that they thought that incineration was a waste solution without many drawbacks.

Of course, because of all the background research I had done, I went into the tour with a pretty pessimistic outlook on incineration. But by the end, I understood why so many people see it as such a vital industry. When you watch thousands of tons of municipal trash be dropped off at your facility each day, it’s probably a relief to watch it burn away into nothing, rather than having to imagine it sitting and stinking in a landfill until the end of time.

A few weeks later, on an equally hot July day, I was able to visit the Covanta Camden facility. Our tour at Camden was very similar to our visit to Plymouth, the only differences being that it was so hot we could not go near the furnace, and our tour was lead by Pat, an environmental compliance specialist, not a safety director. Pat was very honest with me about the controversial aspects of incineration, and, as a veteran of the chemical industry, was able to talk extensively about toxicity and emissions. Notably, he mentioned that the environmental impact for the incinerator paled in comparison to that generated by chemical manufacture. You may not be surprised to hear that I did not find that very comforting. Our tour was cut short due to the unbearable heat, though Pat didn’t seem to notice what was truly challenging me: the nauseating smell of burning garbage that permeated every space we entered. Just like at Covanta Plymouth Meeting, I got the feeling that Pat took great pride in the work being done at the incinerator. He talked about how the power produced at Covanta Camden could serve municipal utilities, like the water treatment plant, in the event of a power failure at the main grid. He stressed that the Camden facility recycles as much material as it possibly can and explained the different operating permits issued under Title V of the Clean Air Act, which I had never heard of.

Overall, my tours of these facilities helped me to better understand 1) Covanta as a company and employer 2) incinerator safety protocol 3) different pollution control technologies 4) how those who work at Covanta facilities think about waste incineration, and 5) how incineration facilities actually look and feel when you are standing inside of them. Neither Covanta Plymouth nor Covanta Camden were located in densely populated areas, so I will go into more detail about Covanta’s community impact in Chester, Pennsylvania in the following section.