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Philadelphia could continue sending its trash to be burned in Chester, despite accusations from advocates and some City Council members of environmental racism.
The Sanitation Department plans to award a new contract for municipal waste processing and disposal to Reworld, the company that runs waste-to-energy plants, including the Delaware Valley trash incinerator in Chester. The city also plans to award contracts to WM, formerly Waste Management, and Republic Services. The four-year contracts, with optional extensions of up to three additional years, must be approved by City Council.
A sanitation worker empties a can on trash collection day in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)
Carlton Williams, director of Philadelphia’s Office of Clean and Green Initiatives, said that for the first time, city officials from the Department of Public Health and Office of Sustainability, as well as outside experts, considered the environmental impacts of the waste disposal bids.
“We think this contract here was historic,” Williams said during a news conference Friday, in which city officials described their process for evaluating bids but did not disclose which companies had won the contracts.
Philadelphia’s waste disposal contracts have come under scrutiny in recent years over concerns that burning the city’s waste contributes to unhealthy air pollution in places including Chester.
Under the city’s last seven-year contracts with Reworld and WM, which expired June 30, the city sent roughly 40% of its trash to be burned, mostly at Reworld’s Delaware County facility. Because the city did not fully award the new contracts by the end of June, the Sanitation Department extended its existing contracts by six months.
The city received bids from five waste disposal companies for the new contracts, said city Sanitation Commissioner Crystal Jacobs Shipman. The city considered cost, disposal capacity, operational capability and environmental performance when evaluating them, she said.
Elizabeth Lankenau, director of the city’s Office of Sustainability, said her team conducted a literature review and spoke with experts about burning waste compared to landfilling it.
“There is not a clear consensus of the relative health and environmental impacts between incinerating and landfilling,” she said at Friday’s news conference.
Palak Raval-Nelson, the city’s health commissioner, said that because of “logistical constraints” and the “complexities” of the waste management landscape in southeastern Pennsylvania, it is a “very responsible approach” for the city to use a combination of waste management methods and facilities.
Scott McGrath, environmental planning director for the Department of Sanitation, said a consultant, Civil & Environmental Consultants, Inc., added questions to the city’s request for proposals covering environmental justice, climate resilience and greenhouse gas emissions. He said the consultant compared the sustainability of landfilling and incineration, and found the two methods to be “essentially equal.”
