‘Stop incinerating our trash’
To the Editor,
Having been cited by name in Rich Ailes’s most recent letter to the editor (The Swarthmorean, June 4) regarding trash incineration in Chester, I feel constrained to respond.
In his letter, Mr. Ailes poses three questions:
Why get excited about the impact on Chester? Isn’t Trainer also getting the fallout from Covanta? Indeed it is, a point which we have made repeatedly. It is not just Chester that is suffering from the air pollution emanating from those smokestacks. But the effect on Trainer is dwarfed by the health problems in a city almost 20 times its size.
Who says that smoke is hurting anybody? Trust Covanta to give us the straight scoop about their operation, right? Afraid I have more faith in folks like a former environmental expert in the Obama Administration [“These communities (low-income and communities of color) have been the dumping grounds for the pollution and facilities no one else wants, and have had to literally pay the cost with their health and their lives.”] But maybe Covanta isn’t like that. Wish that was the case. Those incinerators at Covanta’s Chester operation — otherwise known as The Delaware Valley Resource Recovery Facility — emit more particulate matter than any other such facility in the country, according to a 2019 report on WHYY. So what happens with Covanta really does matter. And the news is not all that reassuring. According to a report last January by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, Covanta has agreed to pay $218,000 for past pollution emissions at its Conshohocken waste-to-energy plant. The company was found to have violated the state’s Air Pollution Control Act and the facility’s operating permit. With annual revenue of nearly $12 million from its Chester operation alone, not a great sacrifice.
Finally, asks Mr. Ailes, why not follow the example of European countries and turn trash into energy? Interesting what has been happening in those European countries lately: basically moving away from trash incineration because of the health-damaging side effects, according to Beth Gardiner, whose articles regularly appear in the New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, and Smithsonian. So why not follow the European example indeed and stop incinerating our trash?
Will Richan
Chester
