#BURNING TRASH WITHOUT CREATING POLLUTIN FULL#

And then there’s Covanta’s incinerator, one of the largest of its kind in the US. There’s a waste water treatment plant, a nearby Kimberly-Clark paper mill and a medical waste facility. The industry that remains emits a cocktail of soot and chemicals upon a population of 34,000 residents, 70% of them black. Since the war, however, Chester has been hollowed out, with an exodus of jobs ushering in an era where a third of people live in poverty.

Hugging the western bank of the Delaware River, which separates Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Chester City was once a humming industrial outpost, hosting Ford and General Motors plants.

#BURNING TRASH WITHOUT CREATING POLLUTIN FULL#

Trucks full of garbage used to drive down Thurlow street in Chester to get to the Covanta incinerator. “You may think burning plastic means ‘poof, it’s gone’ but it puts some very nasty pollution into the air for communities that are already dealing with high rates of asthma and cancers.” “This is a real moment of reckoning for the US because of a lot of these incinerators are aging, on their last legs, without the latest pollution controls,” said Claire Arkin, campaign associate at Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. There isn’t much of a domestic market for US recyclables – materials such as steel or high-density plastics can be sold on but much of the rest holds little more value than rubbish – meaning that local authorities are hurling it into landfills or burning it in huge incinerators like the one in Chester, which already torches around 3,510 tons of trash, the weight equivalent of more than 17 blue whales, every day. Half of the city’s recycling is now going to the Covanta plant, the spokeswoman said. It is “virtually impossible to meet the stringent contamination standards established in China”, said a spokeswoman for the city of Philadelphia, who added that the cost of recycling has become a “major impact on the city’s budget”, at around $78 a ton. The imported recycling has to be clean and unmixed – a standard too hard to meet for most American cities. Since January 2018, China hasn’t accepted two dozen different recycling materials, such as plastic and mixed paper, unless they meet strict rules around contamination. Though she would like to move, she can’t because it’s her mother’s home and her mother is elderly and unable to leave. In July 2017, China told the World Trade Organization it no longer wanted to be the end point for yang laji, or foreign garbage, with the country keen to grapple with its own mountains of waste.Ĭathy Morse stands on her porch at her home in Chester, Pennsylvania. Until recently, China had been taking about 40% of US paper, plastics and other recyclables but this trans-Pacific waste route has now ground to a halt. The country generates more than 250m tons of waste a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with about a third of this recycled and composted. The dilemma with what to do with items earmarked for recycling is playing out across the US. Nearly four in 10 children in the city have asthma, while the rate of ovarian cancer is 64% higher than the rest of Pennsylvania and lung cancer rates are 24% higher, according to state health statistics. Some experts worry that burning plastic recycling will create a new fog of dioxins that will worsen an already alarming health situation in Chester. Why should we be expendable? Why should this place have to be burdened by people’s trash and shit?” “People in Chester feel hopeless – all they want is for their kids to get out, escape. “People want to do the right thing by recycling but they have no idea where it goes and who it impacts,” said Zulene Mayfield, who was born and raised in Chester and now spearheads a community group against the incinerator, called Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living.

Mayfield moved to Delaware because she says she couldn’t live in her home anymore despite still owning it Photograph: Hannah Yoon/The Guardian Zulene Mayfield stands in front of her old house in Chester, Pennsylvania.

Burning trash without creating pollutin