Instead of building a trash-to-energy plant, a Carroll advisory panel says more residents should recycle.
“We want this county to see solid waste not as a problem, but as an opportunity,” Sher Horosko, one of nine Carroll Environmental Advisory Councilmembers, told county commissioners Thursday. “We really want to flip the paradigm on its head. It?s a tiny minority of people I see recycling.”
Carroll would share the $328 million trash-to-energy plant with neighboring Frederick County under a plan the counties have been discussing for about a year. The plant would burn about 1,500 tons of trash each day.
With recycling becoming more popular throughout the world, residents will produce less trash, making an incinerator useless, Horosko said.
Carroll residents recycle the third-least among counties in Maryland, and to push them to do more, Horosko advised phasing in mandatory recycling or a program in which people pay less for trash pickup if they throw out less.
But Commissioner Dean Minnich worried it might be impossible to get residents to change their habits and think more about the environment.
“My real problem is changing the public paradigm,” Minnich said. “I don?t think we can change the public mindset that they have a responsibility to the environment.”
Three other trash-to-energy incinerators operate in Maryland, and 83 in the U.S., Horosko said.
She emphasized the success of the pay-as-you-throw program in Penn Township, where the population nearly doubled the last 15 years but the Pennsylvania town threw away about 1,100 fewer tons of trash, from 3,900 down to 2,800.
Commissioner Julia Gouge said she wanted to exhaust recycling possibilities before dumping millions into the incinerator.
“If we can recycle first, we need to do that,” Gouge said. “What you?re talking about is a real plus.”
