6.2 EDSR 10-15-2018 - Laserfiche WebLink

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10/10/2018 Closure of burner could send Twin Cities trash back to the dump - StarTribune.com http://www.startribune.com/burner-s-closure-could-send-twin-cities-trash-back-to-the-dump/494749151/2/3 Those subsidies have disappeared, and wholesale electricity prices are low. Now the burner can’t earn enough from the electricity it generates or attract enough garbage from haulers to stay viable, said Tim Steinbeck, GRE’s director of resource recovery. Great River Energy, which has owned the facility since 2010, is a cooperative energy company with member owners. “We’re hoping others step up and want to keep it going,” Steinbeck said, adding that it will close early next year without a buyer. He said some private parties have expressed interest but declined to say who they were. County commissioners in Anoka and Hennepin have been reluctant to take on a project that GRE had trouble keeping afloat. “For Hennepin County it’s not economical to step up and try and keep this facility going that the private sector apparently could not keep going,” said Hennepin County Board Chairwoman Jan Callison. The county’s own trash burner, in Minneapolis’ North Loop, runs at capacity. The county is pursuing some of the most aggressive efforts in the state to steer recyclables and organics out of the trash, and Callison said it aims to keep trash out of landfills until all other options have been exhausted. “It’s going to be a little bit harder for us to achieve that without having GRE as a resource,” Callison said. About half of the seven-county metro’s waste was recycled or composted last year, according to MPCA data. Another 23 percent was landfilled (http://www.startribune.com/to-bury-or-burn-why-we-re-landfilling-more-than- before/412303123/) and 28 percent was burned. In its most recent plan for managing (https://www.pca.state.mn.us/sites/default/files/w- sw7-21.pdf) the metro area’s garbage, completed last year, the MPCA aimed to reduce landfilling to just 2 percent by 2020. “It’s not just that we’re going backwards in terms of meeting the goals to landfill less waste,” Scheurle said. “We’re also losing the recovery of metals and electricity that we derive from the waste.” Yet burning garbage has its own critics, due to pollutants like nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide that the plants release into the air. “We know that has very real health consequences,” said Margaret Levin, executive director of the Sierra Club North Star Chapter. “So from a public health perspective, there are serious concerns both with combustion of solid waste and with landfilling.” State officials recently became more aggressive about diverting trash from metro landfills. The MPCA began enforcing for the first time () a 1980s-era law that bars landfilling metro trash that could be incinerated. It fined local landfills, citing the unused capacity at GRE’s burner in Elk River. Metro landfills — owned by corporate giants Waste Management and Republic Services — sued to block the effort (http://www.startribune.com/trash-haulers-sue-state-over- push-to-burn-more-garbage/432561183/) . In April, a district judge agreed with their arguments that the MPCA had improperly punished landfills. An appeal is pending. State officials will likely have to decide in the coming years whether to grant additional landfill space for municipal trash. Pine Bend landfill in Inver Grove Heights recently won city consent (https://www.ci.inver-grove-heights.mn.us/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Minutes/_02262018- 68) to amass additional trash on a steeper slope, which will likely need state approvals. And Waste Management has told the MPCA it intends to seek more space at its Burnsville landfill. “That has been Waste Management’s business plan for a long time,” said company spokeswoman Julie Ketchum. “It has nothing to do with the situation at GRE.” Burnsville will have a meeting about the plan Oct. 15.