What would it cost to stop incinerating?

Bottom line… worst case scenario, it would cost each county resident about $1/month – a great deal considering that health impacts from incinerator pollution add up to many times that amount.

Here’s the math:

• Municipalities pay DCSWA $58/ton right now (see below). This cost includes paying for their landfill and its pending expansion.
• Cheapest option should be switching to using DCSWA’s landfill (and saving the space for Delco, not giving 75% away to others).
• Worst case scenario: the pending landfill expansion isn’t granted and Delco needs to go straight to contracting with a private landfill:
  • Philly’s 2019 contract with Waste Management is $65.25/ton (will be $72.34/ton in 2022, a 25% increase over Delco’s current rate).
  • At a typical annual Delco waste generation rate of 355,000 tons, this means a $5.1 million increase county-wide.
  • If making Chester whole, adding $1.3 million to cover the city’s lost host fees, the $6.4M equals $11.34/person per year (<$1/month).

Municipal cost of waste removal

Where Would The Money Come From?

If there is an increase in costs to use the DCSWA landfill directly, this is a short-term increase until waste reduction efforts in the coming years cut waste back, creating greater savings.

$109 million from American Rescue Plan coming to Delco plus a budget looking so good that a tax decrease is being discussed.

“[County Council Chair Brian] Zidek said the money could also be used to find alternative ways to get rid of the county’s waste rather than send it to Chester to be incinerated.”

What would it cost to keep incinerating?

Costs we pay indirectly:

•~$112 million/year just from health impacts of fine particulate matter from Covanta (the share of this pollution from the 31% that is Delco’s trash is about $35 million/year)

•Over $141 million/year just from asthma (the share of this harm that is attributable to Covanta burning Delco’s trash is about $4.4 million/year)

•Far more from impacts of cancer and other health effects caused by Covanta’s pollution

•Incineration has health and environmental costs about twice that of landfills (about $56.3 million/year more to incinerate)

Sources: The $112 estimate comes by extrapolating from a study by an NYU Professor of Environmental Medicine using EPA’s BENmap model which found that just one pollutant (fine particulate matter) from the Wheelabrator Baltimore trash incinerator causes an estimated $55 million in annual harm to health, mostly from cutting people’s lives short.  According to data reported to EPA by the incinerators themselves, Covanta Delaware Valley releases a little over twice as much fine particulate matter (PM2.5) as Wheelabrator Baltimore does.  See: http://www.cleanairbmore.org/uploads/wheelabrator-health-impacts.pdf  On asthma, the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, on page 20 of their 2021 Asthma Capitals report, cites a 2018 study that found the economic burden of asthma in the U.S. to be $81.9 Billion in 2013.  Dividing by Delco’s share of U.S. population, that’s $141.4 million a year.  However, Delco is not average.  The Philly region was ranked the 7^th worst asthma capital in the nation in 2021, and 4^th in 2018 and 2019, so it could easily be twice the national average.