Petitions delivered to DEP office as part of MASSPIRG campaign
With a sizable pile of petitions in hand, campaigners from the staff of the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group (MASSPIRG) delivered over 12,000 signatures to Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Laurie Burt earlier today. These signatures, from citizens around the state, call on the Commissioner to reject the push from the waste industry lobbying for more landfills and incinerators and instead to increase recycling and promote a more sustainable solid waste plan.
The DEP is in the process of drafting the 2010-2020 Solid Waste Master Plan, the state’s blueprint for dealing with waste. With recycling at a virtual standstill in Massachusetts, some DEP staff have indicated that the state will need more ‘capacity’ for waste, which translates into more landfills and incinerators. But MASSPIRG and many other local and state citizen organizations are calling on the DEP to reject that idea, and instead recommit to a comprehensive and ambitious reduce/reuse/recycle agenda.
“The Commissioner has a clear choice: a decade of more garbage, more burying, and more burning; or a plan which finally gets us on an ambitious road to reduce/reuse/recycle,” stated Janet Domenitz, Executive Director of MASSPIRG.
Since the DEP started considering the 2010-2020 Master Plan earlier this year, lobbyists for incinerators and landfills have been out in force. “Our community will suffer if the DEP does not adopt sustainable zero waste policies. Southbridge could have the biggest municipal solid waste (MSW) landfill in the state and possibly a new incinerator. The waste companies will continue to burn and bury trash as long as they are allowed to, despite the fact that burning and burying are the most expensive, most wasteful and most polluting options,” said Kirstie Pecci, an activist and attorney from Residents for Alternative Trash Solutions (RATS!).
Wheelabrator Technologies and Covanta, both of which operate several incinerators in Massachusetts, are lobbying to lift the moratorium on increased incineration which has been in place since 1989. But incineration is a strong deterrent to recycling, according to experts. ‘Incinerator contracts effectively put a cap on recycling. Some communities have had to pay waste companies cash for not delivering their quota of garbage,” remarked Lynne Pledger, a spokeswoman for the Sierra Club of Massachusetts.
Much is at stake. The Master Plan lasts for 10 years, and sets policies which have tremendous impact on the state’s public health, open space, local economies, and water quality. In particular, the burgeoning ‘waste to energy’ industry is pushing to have the incinerator moratorium lifted in the next master plan, which poses, according to many, a significant threat. “We released a major report this summer showing that ‘waste to energy’ represents more pollution, basically creating a landfill in the sky. The report debunks every claim made by the incinerator industry that this new ‘waste to energy’ technology is clean,” said Sylvia Broude of the Toxics Action Center, a contributor to the report “Blowing Smoke: 10 Reasons Why Gasification is not a Solution,” authored by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA). “The Commissioner should make the moratorium on incineration permanent and demonstrate true leadership in getting us to zero waste.”
The wording of the petition, which garnered 12,000 signatures over the summer, is as follows:
“I want the 10 year Solid Waste Master Plan to take steps to eliminate the needless waste generated in Massachusetts and find ways to reduce, reuse and recycle the rest. We should implement the programs and common-sense methods already in use in many communities….to waste much less, with the goal of one day cutting down Massachusetts’ waste to zero. Please get us started down that path now, by crafting a plan that helps us reduce, reuse and recycle more waste while sending far less to landfills and incinerators.”
