The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Landfill expansion plan faces opposition
Trucks have been rolling across Connecticut to Putnam to dump incinerated waste from homes and businesses, and if the town and state get their way, the trucks will keep coming for years.
On Oct. 13, citizens and activist groups will weigh in on whether WIN Waste Innovations can double the size of an existing landfill in Putnam, with a focus on any potential impact to underground aquifers. DEEP has a registration page online for people who wish to view the Wheelabrator Putnam hearing via Zoom.
Wheelabrator Putnam takes in ash from “wasteto-energy” plants in Bridgeport and elsewhere, produced as a byproduct of burning garbage and debris to power steam turbines that pump electricity onto the New England grid. The facility produces about 300,000 gallons of wastewater daily that is treated before being released into the Quinebaug River, which flows south into the Shetucket and Thames rivers, emptying into Long Island Sound.
WIN Waste wants to tack on an extra 68 acres to its existing ash “monofill” facility in Putnam, extending the life of the facility as long as three decades after 2024, when the initial landfill reaches its capacity of 9 million square yards of ash fill. At that point, it would be capped like any dump and put to new use, a solar farm being one option as the case with landfills in Hartford and Bethel over the past decade.
The expanded landfill would include a pair of liners nearly two-and-ahalf inches thick made of high-density polyethylene — like PVC a material used in piping but with vastly greater durability. Monitoring systems will be in place to detect any failure of the landfill liner, and that the aquifer below the site has some capacity to filter any “leachate” before entering the Quinebaug. The drainage area does not feed any private or public supplies of drinking water, according to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
Wheelabrator Bridgeport is the single biggest source of ash destined for Putnam, at about 190,000 tons annually. Another 330,000 tons arrives from the Wheelabrator Westchester plant in Peekskill, N.Y., and the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority plant in Hartford, which is slated to shut
down next summer. Wheelabrator Lisbon and a Covanta plant in Preston combine for nearly 130,000 tons more, with Plainfield Renewable Energy generating less than 13,000 tons from burning scrap wood to produce power.
“Currently, the Putnam monofill indirectly touches more than 80 percent of Connecticut’s population based on the resource recovery facilities currently utilizing the monofill,” said Don Musial, a WIN Waste vice president. “Having the long-term reliability of an in-state facility like the Putnam monofill helps Connecticut’s planners to continue its focus on improving recycling rates that lessen the waste quantities needing to be managed in-state or exported out-of-state. Currently, all of Connecticut’s resource recovery facilities are operating at their full available capacity.”
‘A lot of plastics in there’
The Environmental Protection Agency formally categorizes waste-to-energy plants as renewable resources, while recognizing they offer only a one-shot reuse of waste, unlike solar panels or wind turbines.
In 2017, Wheelabrator Bridgeport and just over 70 other waste-to-energy plants nationally incinerated 33.6 million tons of waste to produce about 0.4 percent of the nation’s electricity, according to EPA estimates. That amounted to 13 percent of the nation’s municipal solid waste, with a quarter of the remainder recycled for other uses and more than half ending up as bulk waste in landfills.
The Wheelabrator Bridgeport plant is rated at 67 megawatts at peak operation, about a seventh of the power output of the nearby Bridgeport Harbor Station plant operated by PSEG.
In Connecticut, incinerators burned about 80 percent of the nearly 2.4 million tons of municipal solid waste produced in 2018, according to DEEP.
Clean Water Action, the Conservation Law Foundation, Rivers Alliance and the Sierra Club are among environmental groups opposing the Wheelabrator Putnam expansion, however, citing the long-term worry of contaminants in “bottom ash” from plants leaching into soil to pose a threat to water supplies; and the possibility of “fly ash” escaping during incineration as air pollution.
“Incinerator ash is concentrated toxins — there’s a lot of plastics in there, dioxins, furans and heavy metals, although they do pull out a lot,” said Susan Eastwood, chair of the Sierra Club Connecticut who toured the site this month. “The main issue is of need, because we’ve calculated the amount of ash that we think Connecticut will be generating in the future. Even if you are never going to get to zero waste, you’re going to have a lot less waste and a lot less ash.”
Putnam’s board of selectmen voted unanimously in early September to inform the state it supports the expansion. WIN Waste’s payments to the town average about $3 million annually, based on periodic surveys to determine how much ash has been transported to the site.
Putnam Mayor Barney Seney acknowledged the biggest reservations by local residents is any possibility of contaminants leaching into water aquifers underground.
“Any water that comes off in washing bays or trucks or everything else is treated through catch basins that they have,” Seney said. “Since they’ve been in operation, there’s been no major spills or incidents involving anything.”
But some in town sent letters to DEEP stating their fears for the longterm effects of any water runoff or leaching. And others statewide question the need, noting the fledgling “zero waste” movement to coach homeowners and businesses to reduce the amount of trash they produce by being more mindful of packaging and opportunities for recycling and composting.
A year ago, DEEP formed a new Connecticut Coalition for Sustainable Materials Management to work with towns to reduce waste — not just plastics, glass and paper that end up dodging recycling bins, but also food scraps and other organic materials that add up to a third of all waste produced in Connecticut each year. Nearly half of the state’s municipalities have joined CCSMM, with Putnam having yet to do so.
CCSMM is collecting applications through the end of October for grants to help town improve food-scrap collections, as well as “pay-as-you-throw” programs that charge households for the amount of garbage picked up curbside, rather than an annual fee.
“How do we pay for the sustainable materials management programs that we want to implement?” DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes said at a CCSMM meeting in July. “We have about $5 million in budget surplus dollars that we are able to use to start up this kind of a grant program.”