Government waste may no longer be the hot topic in Washington, but it sure is down the road in Montgomery County.

Local officials have been saying for years that they want to close the facility where Montgomery County’s waste is piled high, carried by claw into an industrial furnace and then reduced to exhaust and ash in a process that also generates electricity.

Eight years ago, it was one of County Executive Marc Elrich’s campaign promises to close the county’s 30-year-old waste incinerator in Dickerson.

The facility is still operating 24/7, but it appears that could change in the coming years.

County Council members have criticized Elrich and his team for inaction on the issue, claiming that the county executive has cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

But now, with little over a year remaining in his term and despite having recently extended the county’s contract for the incinerator through 2031, Elrich and his team are pushing to secure a temporary alternative to waste incineration and begin the process of shutting down the facility.

Their first step will be securing a contract to divert waste from the incinerator to a regional landfill. Proposals are due in November, and they’ll eventually need the County Council’s approval as part of the budget process.

While the executive and the council have yet to agree on a solution, the two sides both believe the incinerator should be closed, due to health and environmental concerns and the cost of continuing to operate the facility.

“Incinerators continue to be a bad idea. They’re being frowned on around the country,” Elrich said. “We’re not unique in this effort to shut incinerators down.”

Elrich, who is term-limited as county executive, is also gearing up to run for a County Council seat, providing further political incentive for him to follow through on his old campaign promise.

Steven Findlay, president of the Sugarloaf Citizens Association in Dickerson, said that Elrich’s plan could end incineration within two to three years, considering that the county can exit its extended contract early.

He said it could also leave the county without a realistic alternative.

“If this all falls apart, then the county’s back to square one and we are too,” Findlay said. “And I don’t know what would happen.”

No extensions remaining

Decades ago, as a way to process waste without adding to growing landfill piles — while also generating energy for utility use — the county turned to incineration.

Incinerators have been a part of waste management in the U.S. for 140 years, and there were hundreds in operation across the country in the mid-20th century.

But as U.S. environmental standards have become more stringent, waste management has shifted away from incineration. There are now roughly 70 incinerators across the country, including two in Maryland.

Reworld, which operates Montgomery County’s incinerator, has contended that the facility’s toxic emissions — including hydrochloric acid gas, mercury, lead, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and dioxins — are far below state and federal environmental standards, and that 99.9% of what its stack emits are “normal constituents of air,” a spokesperson said.

The Reworld team, though, certainly knows that its days in Montgomery County could be limited.

A Reworld director and managers from the Dickerson facility prepared a detailed presentation and used a recent site visit that included Banner reporters and local government staff to argue that the incinerator is less harmful to the environment and less expensive than trucking trash to a landfill, which is the county’s leading alternative, at least in the near term.

But each Reworld graphic, data point and estimate prompted county staff members to question or dispute the information and assumptions the company made in its analyses, which added tension to the visit.

In the last decade, local officials have twice faced a contract deadline and opted to extend an agreement with the private company operating the incinerator, contending that waste disposal alternatives weren’t yet within reach.

In the months before Elrich took office in 2018, his predecessor, Ike Leggett, signed an extension to keep the incinerator running through 2026.

Earlier this year, Elrich extended the contract again. He said it was a necessary step to allow time for finding an affordable alternative.

“If all I wanted to do was just shut the incinerator and send things to a dump, I could do that. I could have done that yesterday,” Elrich said. “The cost would have been extraordinary.”

This time, however, the county no longer has the option for a short-term extension of its working agreement with Reworld.

The facility also employs 64 people. Facility manager Steve Abe said the teams that operate and monitor the facility are hopeful that there won’t be any major changes coming.

Abe worries about his employees losing their jobs. When asked about his own, he said he doesn’t think about it.

“When they make the decision, I will,” he said.

Inevitability of landfills

It’s no small feat to move on from the county’s primary waste processor.

All trash that county trucks collect from residential waste bins eventually ends up at the incinerator, and more than half of the county’s solid waste goes to the facility. The rest is recycled or taken to a landfill outside the county.

Elrich and his team said the county must decide within the year whether to begin long-hauling waste to landfills and that failing to do so would leave the county having to execute a long-term deal — coming at a “tremendous” cost — to keep the incinerator running for the next few decades.

Elrich’s team says that as the 2031 contract expiration nears, the county will have less leverage in contract negotiations. Waiting will also require the county to cover more maintenance at the aging facility.

Last week, county officials sent out a request for proposals from large regional waste companies that would be responsible for transporting the county’s waste to a regional landfill. The proposals are due in November.

Elrich said that trucking trash would help the county divert waste from the incinerator and potentially plan for other forms of waste processing.

Jeff Seltzer, the county’s acting Director of Environmental Protection, said that long-hauling will be a part of any solution the county adopts.

“No matter what we do, we are stuck with landfilling,” he said.

Community groups opposing the incinerator are also not thrilled about the alternative. Landfills are notorious emitters of the greenhouse gas methane and can contaminate soil and groundwater.

“Every state, every city in the world — and every county — deals with this issue. And it’s just not sexy. It’s just not fun. It’s dirty stuff,” Findlay said. “The landfills are much better run these days, but they’re still a pain in the ass.”

The county has also been in negotiations with Findlay and his team at the Sugarloaf Citizens Association about sending food waste to a composting facility in Dickerson, next door to the incinerator.

Food scraps make up about 25% of the waste that goes to the incinerator. Diverting it for compost would lighten the potential load — and lower the potential cost — for long-hauling to a landfill.

Currently, only yard waste is composted at the facility, and the county needs the association’s approval for that to change.

The Sugarloaf Citizens Association has some authority over operations at the compost site. Its purview is part of a settlement agreement from the 1990s, in which the association railed against the county’s plans for a sewage sludge compost facility at the same site, Findlay said.

The final say

Elrich said that the County Council will have the final say over any proposal from his administration, but has implied that opposing his plan would lead to decades more with the incinerator.

“If they don’t fund the proposal, they’ll have to fund an alternative,” he said. “And their only alternative is gonna be the incinerator.”

Council members, meanwhile, contend that any decision about the incinerator lies with the county executive.

They said that Elrich has created a sense of urgency by not acting on the waste issue sooner.

Elrich, though, said that a large budget deficit consumed his time when he entered office. Then the COVID pandemic hit, demanding his administration’s attention and making it more difficult to marshal the people, resources and meetings necessary to make headway on closing the incinerator.

Councilmember Evan Glass, who chairs the environment committee and is running to succeed Erlich as county executive, said that Elrich’s inaction has cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

Waste incineration accounted for about $35 million of the county’s $155 million solid waste spending last fiscal year.

This year, the county will spend nearly $30 million more on the facility, which Glass said will cover overdue maintenance that Elrich neglected over his two terms.

Elrich, meanwhile, said Reworld never requested county funding to cover maintenance. He said the added spending will cover upgrades meant to extend the life of the incinerator, “which is what we’ve been trying to avoid.”

“We were not deferring annual maintenance,” he said.

The council, Glass said, also rejected a proposal from Elrich to set aside millions of dollars to plan for a new waste management facility that would’ve cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build.

However, the county executive said, “there’s no cheap path out of the situation we’re in,” and that the county will have to shell out money regardless of the solution.

Councilmember Marilyn Balcombe, whose district includes the Dickerson incinerator, said that while there appears to be a consensus among county leaders about closing the incinerator, the political will to get it done has been absent.

“My view on this,” she said, “is that if there was an intention to close the incinerator down by 2026, then we should have started this conversation a long time ago, and that didn’t happen.”