A waste-to-energy incinerator has fired up Carroll residents worried about environmental and financial effects, but in Harford emotions stayed cool.
Harford has burned about 360 tons of garbage per day for the past 20 years in its waste-to-energy incinerator in Edgewood, selling the electricity to the neighboring Army base while boosting the recycling rate to the top in the state.
The incinerator could be upgraded and expanded to handle 1,500 tons of trash per day, the same capacity Carroll is mulling, but Harford residents are not expressing the same worries about potential detrimental effects to the environment, decreased recycling or increased costs.
Harford?s incinerator would cost $370 million; Carroll?s, $320 million.
“We are the highest-recycling county in the state, so it?s a real fallacy that burning trash takes away from recycling, and we?ve been real strong in that statement,” said Robert Cooper, Harford?s public works director.
The incinerator allows the county to use the ash as cover for landfills in Baltimore County and recycle more metals, pulled from the ash, than it otherwise could, Cooper said.
But incinerator opponents in Carroll have criticized the recycling rates associated with incinerators, saying they are not consistent with the spirit of recycling.
“Do you consider taking ash and throwing it over a landfill legitimate recycling?” asked Sher Horosko, a member of Carroll?s commissioner-appointed Environmental Advisory Council. “Does that sound like what we understand recycling is, as far as saving the resources of our planet? Not to me, it doesn?t.”
An incinerator by itself is not responsible for the county?s recycling rate, Cooper countered.
“We start with kids in the fourth grade in the elementary schools and have a program where our people go into schools and teach recycling to the kids,” Cooper said. “Some of those kids are now adults and they?re continuing to recycle.”
It?s a plan that Mike Evans, Carroll?s public works director, has often said he wants to copy.
In addition, Cooper said the incinerator is not a burden on the taxpayers. “We?re in pretty good shape to being self-supported.”
The only complaints Harford officials have received about the incinerator are from neighbors, who worry a larger facility could bring more traffic.
