Dealing with trash is a dirty business.
Nothing surprising there. But apparently, deciding what to do with waste isn’t so simple either, as evidenced by a new proposal to build a waste-to-energy plant on a piece of land near the Hudson River in Bethlehem.
You can read all the nitty-gritty details in Marcy Velte’s story. Gasification proponents would tell you this process is a super-efficient method of producing energy from waste. Detractors might argue it’s really no different than burning garbage with the help of a computer.
That’s not an argument we’re going to tackle here, because there are very good points to be made on both sides. Let’s just point out a few facts, for the record.
For starters, no formal proposal has been put to the town by Recycling Solutions Technology. We’re still very short on details that would have to be forthcoming with an actual application.
Next, the type of technology that would be used at a Bethlehem waste-to-energy facility is not what you might call tried and true — the only facility exactly like it is in Kentucky and there are only a handful of gasification plants worldwide.
Thirdly, and quite importantly, the Greater Capital District is slowly but surely running out of places to put its trash. Albany’s Rapp Road Landfill (where much of the area, including Bethlehem, drops its refuse) is projected to fill up sometime around 2021. A commission of stakeholder communities has been pondering exactly what to do with the hundreds of thousands of tons of trash produced every year once that happens, and the fact they haven’t come up with a winning solution yet hints at the significance of that hurdle.
Colonie’s landfill is likely to have a longer future, but even it will eventually run out of room.
What will probably end up happening once the Rapp Road trash heap is capped is most of the Capital District will truck its garbage hundreds of miles to other landfills — not a cheap or sustainable prospect.
A gasification plant wouldn’t be a silver bullet to our trash issues, but it is one element of what must be a multifaceted and smart approach to waste management.
It’s pretty easy to place your papers and plastics into their separate bin and wave them goodbye when the collection truck comes along. It’s far less easy (or pleasant) to contemplate the rest of the waste stream, the millions of tons of stuff that stinks up the car as you merge onto the Thruway from Exit 24. Yet we’re on the brink of having our refuse filling up our backyards.
We’d hesitate to label opposition to this facility as NIMBY-ism because there are some very relevant concerns to be had here regardless of where the plant is located. Fortunately, New York State’s nexus of environmental and planning regulations await this process, including the not-so-simple Environmental Impact Statement (like Bethlehem’s Michael Morelli, we find the applicant’s claim the planning process could completed in a year’s time to be wildly optimistic). This will reveal a great deal of important information to not only town planners, but also to residents and interest groups.
In the interim, let’s keep an open but critical mind about what this parcel — the proud home of failed plans for a mixed-use development and recycling plant — might one day become other than an empty field.