Copyright The Philadelphia Inquirer
CHESTER — Like a Ben Franklin impersonator waving at Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, tour guide B. Preston Lyles directed the tour group’s attention to various landmarks as they passed by. But instead of highlighting monuments that made locals swell with pride, Lyles was pointing to sites he said made the people of Chester get sick and die younger: power plants, an oil refinery, a sewage sludge-burning facility, and — most relevantly for Friday’s group — the Reworld trash incinerator, the destination for about a third of the rubbish collected by Philadelphia’s city government. “Chester City is known as one of the nation’s worst cases of environmental racism,” Lyles, a Temple University professor, told the group, referring to the concentration of polluting industries in Black and brown communities. “It is not just because the city holds the nation’s largest waste incinerator, but due to an extreme concentration of toxic industries in and adjacent to such a small city.” Philadelphia City Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, who is hoping to end the city’s relationship with the Reworld incinerator, on Friday attended the Energy Justice Network’s “Toxic Tour” in and around Chester to highlight the facility’s impact on Philly’s southern neighbors. » READ MORE: Philly burns a lot of its trash. A new Council ordinance would stop that. “From a justice and fairness perspective, it just seems so wrong to me and so obvious,” said Gauthier, who was joined on the tour by Councilmember Kendra Brooks and staffers for other lawmakers. “Seeing the incinerator on the waterfront and all of these other dirty uses and the abandoned homes, that made me want to do this more, because it’s wrong. It’s wrong that people should be loaded down with all these toxic uses.” Reworld in 2024 burned more than 355,000 tons of trash collected by the city. Its contract with Philadelphia ends in June 2026. Gauthier has introduced a bill, the Stop Trashing Our Air Act, that would prohibit the city from incinerating trash, and Council’s Committee on the Environment, which she chairs, will likely hold a hearing on it this fall. Reworld spokesperson Linda Ribakusky said the company is a “leading sustainable waste solutions provider.” The Chester facility, she said, offers “a more sustainable alternative to landfilling by converting waste into renewable energy and recovering valuable metals that would otherwise be lost.” “The Reworld Delaware Valley facility helps reduce greenhouse gases by avoiding landfill methane and generates enough clean electricity to power more than 50,000 local homes each year,” Ribakusky said in a statement. “We are proud to be an active part of the Chester community. Working alongside local schools, nonprofits, neighbors, and community organizations, we support initiatives that create real impact.” ‘Now is the time’ The Philadelphia Sanitation Department collects and disposes of about half of the city’s waste, said Michael Ewall, founder of the Philly-based Energy Justice Network. The other half is handled by private haulers hired by businesses and owners of larger residential properties. Under its contract, Reworld takes one-third of the municipally collected trash to the Chester incinerator, which the company says produces about 87 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 52,000 homes, while burning the waste. WM, which operates a major landfill in Bucks County’s Falls Township, takes the other two-thirds. When the most recent contracts were signed in 2019, the city agreed to pay roughly $65 per ton of trash to both Reworld, which was then known as Covanta, and WM, formerly Waste Management. Gauthier said she has had constructive conversations with Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration about eliminating incineration from the city’s waste management operations, and is hopeful the city will include environmental justice concerns in its request for proposals for the new contracts. Parker’s office did not respond to a request for comment. The Chester incinerator provided a flashpoint in the 2023 mayoral election, which Parker won. During a debate, a moderator asked candidate Jeff Brown about the incinerator, prompting Brown to say, in part, “The trash has to go somewhere.” In a debate performance that was key to her rise and Brown’s downfall in the race, Parker was among the candidates who pounced on the soon-to-be-infamous comment. “That response is the same way you treat the Black and brown community,” said Parker, who ran on a campaign to turn Philly into America’s “safest, cleanest, greenest” big city. » READ MORE: ‘The trash has to go somewhere:’ Jeff Brown draws rebuke over debate answer on Philly sending trash to Chester During the debate, however, Parker was not asked directly if she would commit to ending the city’s contract with Reworld. “I was enthused to hear our mayor speak about this on the campaign trail,” Gauthier said. “I hope we all want to do the right thing. Now is the time to show that.” Environmental advocates contend that neither landfills nor incinerators are good for the environment and urge municipalities to focus on reducing waste in the first place. For instance, Ewall, who developed a policy platform called the Zero Waste Hierarchy, pointed out that thousands of communities now charge residents for each bag of trash just as utilities charge for each gallon of water or kilowatt of electricity. But for the “residuals” that do need to be collected, advocates have generally coalesced around the conclusion that incineration is more harmful than landfilling, Ewall said. Delaware County, which adopted a Zero Waste Plan in September, commissioned a 2021 study that found incineration was the costliest of its waste-disposal options, from both a health perspective and a financial one. The county determined that each ton of trash burned at the incinerator produced $234 to $337 in health and environmental costs. The impact from landfilling, meanwhile, was $144 per ton. ‘Reverse the environmental tragedy’ Founded by William Penn, Chester is the oldest city in Pennsylvania. But over the last century, it has become a hub for some of the region’s least-wanted uses, including polluting manufacturers, fossil fuel facilities, a state prison, and, since the early 1990s, the incinerator. About 69% of Chester’s 33,000 residents are Black, and 31% live below the federal poverty line. “We hope that Philadelphia is listening in a strong way … as we attempt to reverse the environmental tragedy that has occurred here in the last 3½ decades due to the incineration of trash,” Chester Mayor Stefan Roots said Friday. “It’s an old technology, and it’s time for it to go. Especially in a community like Chester that’s looking to develop, it’s one of our biggest impediments.” » READ MORE: For 30 years, she has fought a waste-to-energy plant in Chester City: ‘We don’t have a choice’ About 31% of the trash the incinerator burned in 2024 comes from Philly, with Delaware County accounting for 28% and New York City 26%. During the tour, Lyles explained how environmental racism can occur even if decision-makers are not consciously prejudiced against certain communities, because wealthier areas often organize to prevent polluting industries in their backyards. “In the late 1990s, there were about 60 proposals for new gas-fired power plants in PA. Only 16 of them were built,” he said. “Most of them faced a stiff opposition from community groups in suburban and rural areas, but those on either side of Chester went in with no organized opposition.” The final stop on the tour was a row of boarded-up and dilapidated homes along a railroad used for industrial purposes near the edge of the incinerator property. The homes started emptying out in the early 2000s, Ewall said, and the last was abandoned a few years ago. He recalled meeting one of the last residents to leave. “She had six grandchildren. She lived with her granddaughter, around 14, and one of the times I met her, had an oxygen tank that she would carry around with her just to be able to breathe,” Ewall said. “They just kind of disappeared one day, and I saw a boarded house.”
