All tagged Covanta
The way I see it, the current debate about the Covanta incinerator in Chester is skewed, warped, and hysterical.
I’m ready to be part of a long-term plan to improve air quality in Chester, to ensure that the Delaware County landfill Delco is used equitably and ethically, and to put us all on the road to zero waste. It’s a LONG road. I’ve started. I hope you will too.
Having been cited by name in Rich Ailes’s most recent letter to the editor (The Swarthmorean, June 4) regarding trash incineration in Chester, I feel constrained to respond.
The idea of somehow achieving zero waste is utter fantasy. It is about as realistic as loading all the trash onto rocket ships and dumping it in space.
Recent letters to the editor of The Swarthmorean regarding the waste-to-energy plant run by Covanta in Chester appear to have veered into the realm of propaganda rather than actual fact.
Covanta is indeed “well within breathing distance of many people, including – on a calm day – Swarthmore residents.” But by far the worst pollution fallout is right here in Chester, as Covanta burns other people’s trash.
A 2019 study by the New School concluded that so-called “waste-to-energy” plants emit mercury, lead, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, and carbon monoxide. Research indicates that Chester’s residents suffer from heart disease, asthma, and other chronic illnesses at levels far higher than the national average.
I am troubled by an attitude I see too often: that somehow, because there is already some pollution in Chester, it can have even more! What is a little more pollution, after all? In response, I would ask: Where does YOUR trash go, and what will you do to help decrease the pollution it causes?
In my letter to the editor (April 2), titled “What’s wrong with Swarthmore’s Zero Waste resolution,” I inaccurately located the Covanta plant in the wrong place: on the north side of Interstate Route 95, which is far from its actual location on Highland Avenue.
I think the passage of Swarthmore’s Zero Waste Resolution was ill advised. I also think that the Swarthmorean’s article reporting on this resolution (March 19) was not effective journalism.
Would that life were as simple as was suggested by the letter writer from Rutledge (March 19), regarding the toxic fumes from Covanta’s incinerator in Chester. Just use available technology, he says. Wonder why nobody has thought of that, in all the decades that the smoke coming out of that incinerator has been causing horrendous health problems.
If the Covanta incinerator is shut down, the immediate effect would be to increase solid waste, not decrease it. There would be more trucks rumbling through Chester and speeding up and down the Blue Route, going to and from the landfills upstate. It seems to me that, if the problem is dirty air, then what you need to do is clean up the smokestack to remove the pollutants that are coming out.
On March 8, Swarthmore Borough Council made a decision that could dramatically change the way our community handles its waste. Resolution 2021-04 requests Delaware County Council to ensure that the Delaware County Solid Waste Authority not extend its contract with the Covanta waste incinerator in Chester.
