Ocean City’s city council has voted to renew the town’s contract with waste incinerator Covanta, meaning a return to recycling pickup in the resort town is unlikely for at least the next several years. The Maryland beach town first signed on with Covanta shortly after the city stopped recycling in 2010, citing the financial cost. Officials there have hailed “waste-to-energy,” as it’s known in the industry, as an inventive and affordable way to repurpose trash. The steam created by burning trash at the plant produces enough energy to power about 48,000 homes, Covanta says.
But the arrangement has drawn ire from activists lately, in part because the waste, recyclables included, is sent to an incinerator in a low-income community of color more than 100 miles away in Chester, Pennsylvania. Some of the environmental groups consider burning waste altogether objectionable because of air pollution concerns. They were pushing for Ocean City to once again haul its garbage to the Worcester County landfill, and restart a recycling program that would earn them a county rebate.
Environmentalists say neither solution is perfect. Landfilling waste is worrisome mainly because it gives off large amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas even more potent than carbon dioxide. Much of the concern around incinerators focuses on the toxins released into the air through their heavily regulated smokestacks, delivering disproportionate impacts to often disadvantaged communities from others’ waste.