Lamont’s solid waste plan faces test as lawmakers confront state’s trash crisis
HARTFORD — State Rep. Mary Mushinsky, a Wallingford Democrat, can remember the last time lawmakers were forced to confront the problem of trash that threatened to overwhelm Connecticut’s cities and towns. It was in the late 1980s.
As the then-leader of the legislature’s Environment Committee, Mushinsky was the architect of efforts to close down the state’s stinking morass of landfills and illegal dumps, which had turned into eyesores in many cities and threatened to taint nearby groundwater supplies.
As a replacement, the state built a network of incinerators that would burn whatever waste that could not be recycled into energy, a model that would eventually earn Connecticut accolades for decades to come.
“At the time, we re-did everything. It was very controversial. There were fights over where the sites would be, where the transfer stations would be. It was difficult to make the transition,” Mushinsky recalled this week. “But we did it.”
Last year’s closure of one of the hallmark wasteto-energy facilities of that era — Hartford’s MIRA plant — however, has presented the state with another trash crisis, this one driven by the cost of sending roughly 860,000 tons of trash every year to outof-state landfills.
On Monday, lawmakers will once again kick-off the search for a solution to the state’s trash woes, starting with a public hearing on Gov. Ned Lamont’s plan to address the problem through new trash-diversion tactics, pressure on industry, and money for waste infrastructure projects.
Lamont’s proposal, House Bill 6664, focuses on an immediate reduction in the amount material that ends up in the solid waste stream by rampingup the separation of food scraps — which make up roughly 22 percent of the state’s garbage — into composting facilities, as well as placing tougher mandates on the producers of packaging materials that are increasingly filling up trash bins to find a better way to dispose of their products.
In addition, the bill would increase the state’s current $1.50-per-ton assessment on trash sent to waste-to-energy plants to $3 per ton on all trash that is processed within Connecticut and $5 per ton on trash that is shipped out of state.
That additional revenue, which the state estimates will amount to around $10 million per year, would be used to fund additional waste-diversion strategies or as bond revenue to develop infrastructure such as digesters to process food scraps or even modern waste-to-energy facilities. The bill would also create a new Connecticut Waste Authority to take over MIRA’s operations at the now-shuttered South Meadows locations and work toward a future redevelopment of the site.
Initial concerns about the governor’s plans, particularly the increased assessments on cities and towns, have been raised by lawmakers and local leaders, including at a forum hosted Thursday by House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford.
At the forum, officials pointed out that many municipalities and trash haulers are already being saddled by higher tipping fees as a result of having to haul their trash long distances to out-of-state landfills following the closure of MIRA.
According to the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, tipping fees are expected to average around $110 per ton this year, a more than 40 percent increase over the last five years, and will rise even further to nearly $123 per ton by 2026.
“We believe it’s sort of adding insult to injury at this point because towns are already paying exorbitant costs,” said Donna Hamzy Carroccia, the chief strategy officer for the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities. She added that the state’s existing waste-management strategy has not offered other solutions to towns beyond shipping their waste to states like Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Lamont’s commissioner of DEEP, Katie Dykes, defended the additional assessment fees during Thursday’s forum, saying they provided a “permanent, recurring” revenue source needed to fund diversion efforts that, she predicted, would help lower costs for towns in the long run.
“In the context of this level of increase, it’s modest,” Dykes said, referring to rapid growth in municipal tipping fees over the last decade. “But I understand that anything that looks like an increase in tip fees, I understand why they would have that concern.”
Additionally, Dykes said that implementing an extended producer responsibility program on packaging — essentially requiring companies like Amazon to take on the responsibility of disposing of their products — could divert up to 190,000 tons of waste a year, saving municipalities $50 million in costs.
Municipal leaders, however, have expressed skepticism over the state’s promises of savings through EPR programs and expanded organics collection, which the governor’s plan would make available to all residents beginning in 2028. (The legislation would also expand an existing state program requiring certain large-scale producers of food scraps, such as supermarkets and processing centers, to divert their organic waste to composting beginning in 2025).
Even under ideal conditions, Hamzy Carroccia said, towns would be left “paying more now, and we’re going to continue to pay more until those eventualities come to fruition.”
In order to fill the gap in the state’s waste-handling capacity that was created by MIRA’s closure, Dykes and lawmakers agreed that Connecticut would need to develop some kind of facility capable of handling hundreds of thousands of tons of trash that is not able to be recycled, composted or diverted through other means.
As a part of Lamont and DEEP’s latest strategy addressing solid waste, the agency is to solicit bids for the development of such a facility, though several lawmakers said Thursday they did not anticipate a return to the days when trash was piled up in landfills.
After departing Thursday’s speaker’s forum, Mushinsky said the state should take a more active role in setting up regional waste districts that provide a guaranteed source of waste — and revenue — for a new generation of facilities that would either burn or otherwise dispose of the state’s trash by some other, modern means.
“To be honest with you, I didn’t hear any solution out of today’s meeting,” Mushinsky said. “I was listening.”
Ritter said that Thursday’s forum was an early sign that parts of the governor’s plan would be a “hard sell” for the legislature, while others, such as requiring hospitals and schools to divert food scraps, “would be a big, big step in the right direction.”
Beginning with the public hearing next week, Ritter said that he anticipated that lawmakers would make their own changes to the legislation based on input from local leaders, trash haulers, and environmental advocates. Because of the complexity and scale of the issue, Ritter said hoped to get buyin from Democrats and Republicans on a final set of initiatives near the end of the session in early summer.
Ultimately, Ritter said he agreed with Dykes and the Lamont administration that some form of legislation needs to be passed this year to get the state moving back in the direction of handling all of its waste within its own borders.
“They’re not sacrosanct, they’re not set in stone,” Ritter said of the governor’s proposals. “But you cannot come back to me and say there’s no alternative.”