What America can learn from Miami’s trash nightmare
DORAL, Fla. - Two years ago, Miami-Dade County awoke to a garbage nightmare. Both of the county landfills were nearly full, and the aging incinerator that once burned the lion’s share of the county’s waste had itself been consumed in a runaway trash fire.
After the fire, County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava proposed what she said would be the best solution to a bad problem: replacing the wrecked incinerator with a new $1.5 billion waste-to-energy facility that would generate enough electricity for 70,000 homes, pollute less than the old plant and - the mayor said - wouldn’t stink.
If built, it would be the biggest incinerator in the United States, potentially paving the way for other cities and counties to adopt a waste-management method that some scientists say is the least bad option to deal with trash that can’t be recycled or composted.
The only problem is, nobody wants it. Environmentalists called the proposal a way to greenwash burning garbage. Neighbors who lived with the old incinerator’s stink protested the plan. “I’m not saying I’m glad it burned down,” said Fabiano de Lisio, who has run a business selling motors a block from the incinerator site for 15 years. “But I’m happy I can’t smell that stench anymore.”
The core of the problem is that Americans throw out more trash than almost any other people on the planet - and lag behind other wealthy countries in recycling and composting. That leaves U.S. cities with two flawed options for getting rid of waste: burn it or bury it.
In recent years, more local governments have been considering incineration. The strategy has become common in Europe, China and Southeast Asia as the technology has advanced from the heavily polluting plants of the early 20th century to a new generation of facilities that contaminate less and offer other opportunities. In one famous Danish example, the incinerator doubles as a ski slope and public park.
Miami-Dade County’s predicament is a test of whether this solution could take root in the United States, as well.
After months of public uproar and private lobbying - including by the Trump family, which owns the nearby Trump National Doral golf course - Levine Cava pulled her support for the incinerator plan. The mayor now says the county should stick with the emergency measure it has been using since the fire: sending trucks and trains 100 miles north to dump waste in central Florida.
The final decision is up to the county commissioners, who will vote in coming weeks.
“I became mayor to make tough decisions about our future, and this is certainly among the toughest, if not the toughest, I have encountered,” Levine Cava said.
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Living next to a trash fire
The old Miami-Dade County incinerator, opened in 1985, was built at the height of the American garbage-burning boom.
Like most incinerators, it used the intense heat of the trash fire - which burned at about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit - to boil water into steam, which spun a turbine and generated electricity. During the 1970s energy crisis, high fuel prices prompted many American cities to build incinerators as a way to boost electricity production and reduce their trash to ash, which takes up 90 percent less space.
Incineration peaked in the early 1990s, when 15 percent of U.S. trash was burned, but it tapered off as the Environmental Protection Agency tightened air pollution rules throughout the decade. Rather than install expensive filters to capture toxins before they blew out of the smokestacks, officials shut down many incinerators.
Unlike most local governments, Miami-Dade County didn’t build its incinerator in a poor, minority neighborhood; it stuck the facility on the edge of the Everglades, miles from most homes and businesses. But then the county sprawled west and swallowed it up. The city of Doral was founded in 2003 and quickly grew around the plant as South Florida real estate prices skyrocketed. There are now $1.7 million condos across the street from the incinerator site.
The people who live and work nearby remember the many indignities of living next to a trash fire.
Some mornings, they would wake up and find a fine dusting of ash on their cars’ windshields. Residents complained about swarms of flies and the rumble of machinery, like the sound of a distant airplane taking off all day long. But the one memory seared into everyone’s mind is the smell.
A perfume seller who works across the street from the incinerator site said the scent had notes of dead dog. A mom said she quit taking her kids to play at a nearby park because the stench was too oppressive.
“It was like a highway rest-stop bathroom that never gets cleaned. It was hardly bearable,” said Roberto Colmenares, who coaches kids at an indoor soccer pitch a block from the incinerator and lives across the street from the site.
When the incinerator caught fire on Feb. 12, 2023, it burned for more than a week. Freddy Cruz, who works at nearby catering company, said the fire produced an acrid, sulfurous smoke that made him light-headed and prompted his boss to close the business for several days. But when the smoke cleared, the plant was demolished - and the smell was gone for good.
“I’m grateful that it’s over,” said Colmenares. Asked if he would support rebuilding the plant, he said, “Please, no.”
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Burying vs. burning
After the incinerator burned, Miami-Dade County’s trash chief resigned and warned of a looming garbage crisis. The incinerator had been burning half of the 2 million tons of trash the county collected each year. Soon, he wrote in a public letter, the county would have to halt all real estate development if it didn’t find a new place to put its garbage.
As an emergency measure, the county started sending trash to a landfill in a less populated area near Lake Okeechobee, northwest of Palm Beach.
This sort of trash pilgrimage is relatively common in the United States. Los Angeles sends trains full of trash 200 miles away to landfills in the Mojave Desert. New York City sends its garbage to dumps as far away as South Carolina.
Landfills are cheaper to build than incinerators, and they’re usually farther away from cities. “Landfills are more out of sight, out of mind,” said Timothy Townsend, an environmental engineering professor at the University of Florida.
But, in general, incinerators probably create less planet-warming pollution than landfills, according to Townsend, who wrote a meta-analysis reviewing a dozen conflicting studies on the subject.
Incinerators release carbon dioxide from every piece of trash they burn - but they offset some of their environmental harm by generating electricity and recovering scrap metal. Landfills release methane, an extra-powerful greenhouse gas that comes from food and yard waste rotting underground without oxygen - and although modern landfills capture most of the gas and sometimes convert it into energy, methane is such a potent planet-warmer that it usually outweighs the carbon from incinerators.
“It would be pretty rare to ever collect enough methane to tip the balance so landfills are better,” Townsend said. But he acknowledged it would be possible for landfills to come out on top if they had exceptional methane-capture rates, and if local residents composted more of their food waste and yard trimmings than Americans typically do.
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Imagining a ‘zero waste’ world
Environmentalists and some Doral residents say incineration is a flawed solution that doesn’t address the root problem: Americans throw out too much stuff - more than twice as much as we did 50 years ago, according to EPA data.
Miami-Dade is particularly bad: The county dumps twice as much trash per resident as the rest of the country, in part because 27 million tourists visit each year and add to the waste pile, Levine Cava said.
The best way for the county to deal with this rising tide of trash, say local activists and national researchers, is to reduce waste, recycle and compost as much as possible, and then dump what’s left into a landfill.
Once an incinerator is built, it has to be fed a constant stream of trash to keep operating and generating electricity, discouraging local governments from reducing their waste, said Lily Baum Pollans, an associate professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College who wrote a book about the politics of waste management in U.S. cities.
“When everyone starts to feel down and frustrated and like there’s no good answer, I’m like, ‘Yes, there is a perfectly good answer: We don’t need so much disposable stuff,’” Pollans said.
Miami-Dade County is one of at least 100 U.S. local governments that have developed a “zero waste” plan in recent years, according to a tracker from Waste Dive, a publication focused on waste management.
But Florida is one of eight U.S. states that has made it illegal for local governments to ban or limit certain kinds of plastic waste, usually a key element of such plans. Instead, Miami-Dade County pledged to use less plastic in facilities it owns, including Miami International Airport and PortMiami, the world’s biggest cruise ship port.
Environmentalists say the county should also step up composting and recycling. Miami-Dade composted and recycled 38 percent of its waste in 2023, county officials said, which is above the U.S. average of roughly 30 percent. Raising that number would require the county to build new waste facilities - and Levine Cava’s original proposal did call for new recycling and composting equipment to be built alongside the incinerator.
But county officials say they would probably still have to find space somewhere else in Florida for a large-scale composting facility. Meanwhile, Miami, the biggest municipality within Miami-Dade County, is debating ending its recycling program to cut costs.
It’s unlikely that any county could recycle or compost all of its waste. Even San Francisco, which fines residents and businesses that don’t separate their trash, composts and recycles only about half the waste from households and small businesses. The rest goes in a landfill.
In December, Levine Cava criticized landfills for producing more greenhouse gas emissions than incinerators. “Landfill has a lot of problems,” she said, adding, “Incineration just gets a bad rap because … we don’t think people are really digesting the scientific information.”
But in a Saturday memo, the mayor changed her stance. She recommended that the county continue dumping its waste in central Florida while looking for a place to build a new landfill outside Miami-Dade County. An incinerator, she wrote, would stretch the county’s thin budget and “likely generate legal or other challenges that would significantly extend the project timeline.”
The county commissioners are scheduled to make a final decision on Feb. 19.
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https://washingtonpost.com/documents/44607dde-16aa-408a-9292-04d39bc4aa12.pdf
https://washingtonpost.com/documents/33bd97ea-5360-453c-ba07-921806a73e84.pdf
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