Threat to Public Health
By Lucy Corlett
As I mentioned, much of the news about the post-ban recycling crisis focuses on Chester, Pennsylvania-- a small, predominantly African-American city on the banks of the Delaware River. Since the early 1990s, Covanta Delaware Valley and the residents of Chester have borne the burden of incinerating waste from all neighboring municipalities, including New York City, which produces 14 million tons of trash every year. The Delaware Valley facility traditionally burned non-recyclable garbage, a practice that was already resented by the Chester community. When Philadelphia decided to send the majority of its recyclables to Chester, residents felt that it was an additional blow to the community in disregard to the decades-long opposition to the incinerator’s presence.
The residents of Chester know that waste incineration takes a toll on public health. Four in 10 children living in the city have asthma. The rate of ovarian cancer is 64% higher than that of the rest of Pennsylvania. Zulene Mayfield, chair of Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living, has been fighting Covanta for years. In an interview quoted by a WHYY article from May, 2019, she stated that “the city’s rate of child hospitalization due to asthma is more than three times the state average,” and that the incinerator is “literally killing people… The City of Brotherly Love chooses not to incinerate their trash within their border, they don’t mind poisoning our children.”
Chester residents also know that the waste incinerator is not the only health threat to set up shop in their city. From the Kimberly-Clark paper mill to the Monroe Energy Oil Refinery to the DELCORA sewage treatment plant, Chester has become what Penn’s Center for Excellence in Environmental Toxicology describes as a community “already burdened by cumulative sources of industrial air emissions.” This diagram shows the compounding health impacts of living in the shadow of these polluters.
Covanta insists that its incineration facilities meet EPA standards. However, the correlation between the inhalation of nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide and instances of asthma raises concerns about the stringency of the emission regulations imposed on Covanta’s facilities. A PBS NOVA article points out that EPA pollution data from 2014 shows the Delaware Valley facility as releasing “more NOx and four times more SO2 than any other municipal waste incinerator in the state.”
