Counterpoint | HERC garbage burner is a metaphorical gnat to pollution’s tiger

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In 1981, Larry, my Minnesota Pollution Control Agency director and a mentor to me, said: “We’re batting at gnats in a jungle filled with tigers.” He taught me how disorganized thinking about environmental dilemmas can mislead.

The gnat getting attention currently is the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center (HERC) and whether that waste-to-energy garbage incinerator in Minneapolis should be closed. If it were, 365,000 tons per year of trash would be shipped and dumped into landfills in Burnsville, Inver Grove Heights, Rosemount, Elk River, Gaylord, Eau Claire, Wis., and Lake Mills, Iowa.

A tiger is the poor air quality and poor health of people in north Minneapolis. The pollution arises mostly from transportation. Great big highways gather cars and trucks; exhaust and dust pollute air. Residents do not have the considerable resources required to mitigate the risks, either through protective HVAC systems or health care. And you can’t close the roads.

When the blame is shifted to racism (environmental justice) and to HERC specifically, then the gnat’s buzzing becomes intense and disturbing. Yet all credible investigations show closing HERC would fail to solve the problem. In fact, closure would increase air pollution. Still, an apparent connection persists in the minds of many. This impairs a real solution.

A second tiger is the increasing generation of unreduced, unrecyclable, non-compostable waste. Waste contains toxic chemicals. We have a take-make-waste product chain. We all use resources this way. Consumers, producers, transporters, wholesalers, importers and retailers make waste. When it becomes more profitable and easier to abandon our take-make-waste resource model, heavily burdened by toxic chemicals, then we’ll all adopt a new and potentially better system. Closing HERC won’t trigger any of those changes.

Their simple conclusion misses some facts:

A third tiger is the landfills. The authors of the recent counterpoint say HERC has a PFAS problem and, as mentioned, conclude that dumps are a “safer bridge until 2054.” They remind me of federal Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. musing about vaccination. HERC has emissions, ergo it is unsafe and must close. RFK Jr. doggedly misses the consequences of being “safer” and unvaccinated — measles, flu, COVID, HPV, death, etc. The counterpoint authors make the same mistake. They missed the consequences of trucking 365,000 tons per year to transfer stations and landfills, then trucking tens of millions of gallons of leachate to publicly owned treatment works (POTWs).

While they waved their arms at HERC and the shortcomings of testing and risk assessments, they missed that:

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Minnesota needs much more waste-to-energy capacity, not less. That includes expanding HERC. Recycling and composting are stuck at about 50%. Waste generation and landfilling are booming. There appears to be no incentive or requirement to clean up dirty dumps. Landfills weren’t safe in 1979 when the Metropolitan Landfill Abatement Act passed the Legislature, they are not safe now, nor will they likely be in 2054.