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Oct. 14—An Earl Township landfill that stores ash from incineration plants has become a battleground between the Delaware County Solid Waste Authority — which owns the landfill — and environmentalists who claim ash from burned trash threatens air quality and groundwater.

"It's far more toxic to have ash than trash in a landfill," said Mike Ewall, founder and executive director of Energy Justice Network. "If you burn (trash), instantly some of it is in the air and the rest is small particles that get to people easier ... kind of like coffee beans versus coffee grounds."

Energy Justice Network advocates for a phaseout of trash incineration facilities that burn trash to produce energy.

Ewall said his organization has been working with communities that oppose incineration plants since 1994.

Many of those facilities are owned by Covanta Holding Corp., N.J., which operates over 40 waste-to-energy plants throughout North America, China and Europe.

Covanta contracts with the solid waste authority to burn waste from Delaware County and have ash from its Philadelphia-area incinerators deposited in the Rolling Hills Landfill in Earl Township.

The authority's decision in April to renew a three-year contract with Covanta was met with pushback from some residents of Chester, Delaware County, where one of Covanta's incinerators is located, according to reporting from WHYY, a Philadephia-based news outlet.

Chester residents claimed the incinerator threatens residents' health and continues a trend of poorer communities being forced to bear the burden of pollution-generating waste facilities.

In a WHYY article, a Covanta spokesperson said it's unfair to characterize the company as environmentally harmful because its facilities filter the byproducts of burning waste to minimize their hazardous impacts.

Covanta said its incinerators benefit the environment by converting waste to energy, reducing the volume of trash sent to landfills and supporting communities via outreach initiatives and fees paid to cities for hosting its incinerators.

To continue meeting its contract obligations, the authority received permission in April from the state Department of Environmental Protection to expand the Rolling Hills Landfill by building higher berms — or artificial embankments — and piling the waste inside.

Hosting the landfill will provide Berks County with $16 million and Earl Township with $27.9 million in fees over 10 years, according to the DEP's analysis of the expansion.

Earl Township residents also receive free waste disposal.

The expansion extends the landfill's life by another 17 years, Ewall said.

In total, the landfill takes in about 400,000 tons of ash from trash incinerators every year.

One part of the authority's expansion plan involves potentially using incinerator ash, instead of soil, to build up the landfill's berms.

Ewall said building ash berms without permission from Berks would be a violation of the authority's agreement with the county, which requires the county to approve any expansion that would increase the width of the landfill.

He also noted that incinerator ash has never been used to build berms in a landfill.

"They (ash berms) are used already today in highway construction, so the science and the engineering is established," said Jim McLaughlin, authority chairman.

McLaughlin said using ash that the facility receives from incinerator plants would alleviate the costs of using soil to build the berms.

He said the authority hired an engineering firm to study whether the type of ash the landfill receives could be processed to have the right properties to be used as construction material in the berm.

Jim Warner, authority interim CEO, said using ash in the berms could save the authority as much as $10 million to $12 million in material costs.

McLaughlin noted the ash for the berms would still be treated and processed like waste and a lining would still protect the chemicals in the berms from leaking into groundwater.

Warner noted the final decision whether the ash berms would be permitted rests with the state DEP.

Ewall said his goal is to stop all ash from coming to the landfill.

"It's just so much more dangerous to burn trash than to put it in a landfill," Ewall said. "The combustion process creates additional toxic materials."

He said state and federal environmental rules for incinerator ash disposal don't properly account for the hazards posed by chemicals in ash, which can leak into groundwater over time.

"We know metals like mercury, cadmium and arsenic are all in ash," Ewall said. "There's also dioxins in ash, which are some of the most toxic chemicals known to science. All landfills eventually leach."

Ewall also said federal regulations don't account for the possibility of breathing in toxic particles from ash in landfills.

"If trucks are driving by and the wind picks up and you get ash from the truck or the top of the landfill, then that's an exposure route that the EPA isn't even counting, that they don't even build the test for," Ewall said.

Ewall said he wasn't aware of any studies that had been done on whether ash in landfills negatively impacts nearby residents' heath.

An analysis by Ewall's organization of publicly available EPA data shows that to make the same amount of energy as a coal-powered plant, trash incinerators release significantly more pollutants than coal, including 28 times as much dioxin, 2.5 times as much carbon dioxide, two times as much carbon monoxide, three times as much nitrogen oxides, six to 14 times as much mercury, and nearly six times as much lead.