Yard Waste Plan Inflames Opposition

Contravening a report by a hired consultant, Monroe County seems to be pushing ahead with a plan to burn yard waste in the Lower Keys. Even by skewing the information provided to consulting firm Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, Inc., that firm recommends composting yard waste over three other alternatives including incineration.

It’s an important issue because the decision that county commissioners will make has a direct impact on whether the county can reach its goal of a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020. In addition the proposal has been developed without any direct involvement by the county’s Climate Change Advisory Committee or any formal approval by that group. And finally, the no-bid process that gives a contract to Rudy Krause Construction for two years raises serious questions.

Originally scheduled to be voted on in December, the commissioners will now hear about the concept from the county’s sustainability program manager Rhonda Haag at their Key Largo meeting next week and then vote on it in March at the session scheduled in Marathon.

1. Meeting greenhouse gas reduction goals

The plan, designed to save the county money, will certainly put a lie to the county’s pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020. Burning yard waste, whether polluting or non-polluting as the county claims, requires burning diesel fuel to power the equipment. Furthermore, since the Lower Keys do not, at present, have a separate pickup of yard waste the concept involves running diesel-powered garbage trucks up and down all the roads in the Lower Keys.

The county hired consultant Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, Inc. (VHB) to evaluate the impact of what’s known as air-curtain incineration. The report lays out four scenarios for disposing of organic material: continuing to ship it to Broward for incineration, shipping the material to Homestead for composting, shipping it to Okeechobee for composting, or burning it in the Lower Keys. That latter proposal is what the county seems to want. The firm was not asked to evaluate composting in the Keys.

But there’s something very odd about the last item. According to the report prepared by Kari Hewitt, a sustainability planner with VHB,

“To simplify this scenario analysis, the County requested that VHB assume no transport of waste. Therefore this scenario has no emissions associated with fuel combustion for transporting waste,” she wrote.

What Hewitt may not have realized is that the Lower Keys, where the incineration is planned, does not currently have a separate pickup of yard waste. Therefore the plan will involve a great deal of “transporting.” The material will first be taken from residents in large garbage trucks to the county transfer station. From there a percentage will travel to Rudy Krause’s location on Ramrod. The county is trying to fudge the numbers.

Despite this, VHB’s analysis still considers burning yard waste “in place” as the one that will produce the most greenhouse gases of all four alternatives, even when so-called biogenic CO₂ emissions are excluded from the analysis. Biogenic emissions results from the burning of organic waste.

The report states that,

“The County will need to consider whether it wants to account for biogenic CO₂ emissions from incineration in its evaluation of these four options. There is a solid argument for excluding them from the analysis in that these emissions will, in fact, occur at some point in time regardless of which scenario is pursued. However, the argument from the other side is that the incineration of waste is expediting CO₂ emissions now, at a time when efforts are underway to globally curb GHG emissions. In addition, beyond carbon storage, there are other climate mitigation and environmental benefits to composting that should be considered.”

In other words, compost.

Burning yard waste instead of composting it represents a backward step in any effort to reduce greenhouse gases. A group from the South Dade Soil and Water Conservation District made a presentation to the Monroe County Commissioners on the advantages of in-vessel composting yard waste rather than burning it. Their proposal was dead on arrival, the county saying it was too expensive.

According to Morgan Levy, an administrator with that group, yard waste is a valuable organic material that can be ground up and composted into a nutritionally valuable soil amendment.

“Composting eliminates hundreds of long haul truck trips that can reduce the carbon footprint of the area, wear and tear on the Keys roads, fuel and disposal and trucking costs,” Levy said. “Our society has for too long taken the easy way of dealing with waste products, like incineration and landfilling.”

It turns out that studies have shown that compost acts as what’s known as a carbon sink, absorbing CO₂ from the atmosphere. According to a study conducted by UC-Berkeley ecologist Whendee Silver composting does sequester carbon.

“It was quite possible that we might have found that you can’t sequester carbon in the soil. But we saw that you can,” she said. “And we could have found that trying to measure carbon captured in the soil could have been like looking for needles in a haystack. But it’s more like looking for bricks in a haystack.”

South Dade’s Levy sees many uses for compost in the Keys.

“This end product could be used on the poor Florida Keys land (very little soil, mostly sand and rock) in parks, roadside medians, and general landscaping. This is true recycling that is producing a beneficial purpose. Incinerating yard waste destroys it forever with the resulting ash to be dealt with,” he said.

2. Where did this plan come from?

Clearly the county, for some unknown reasons, is determined to undertake the plan to incinerate yard waste in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary. In an April 2012 story in the Key West Citizen it was announced that

“The [county] commission last week voted 4-1 to have the Climate Change Advisory Committee develop a plan to mulch, compost or otherwise recycle yard waste instead of hauling it out of the county.”

The one no vote came from Commissioner George Neugent who pushed for composting immediately rather than having the CCAC study it and come up with a plan. The story in the Citizen further reported that,

“Even so, the county is moving too slowly for Commissioner George Neugent, who has been working on the concept for nearly two years. He balked at the idea of referring the matter to the Climate Change Action Committee after its members told the commission they wanted to vet the project for costs and effectiveness. Neugent, the only no vote to referring the task to the committee, said he was working on the plan before the committee was created, and that it is time to stop talking and start acting.

“This is low hanging fruit that we can grab and start working on,” he said after the meeting. “We are way behind other counties and cities. We are behind what the state has required us to do.”

Now Neugent is the one pushing for the incineration plan. In response to a query about why he reversed course on this, he replied in part,

“The knee-jerk reaction to the “demo-project,” to incinerate yard waste only, was expected. In the “Big Picture” of sustainability the presently approved project has clear merits to achieve exactly what the (CCAC) Climate Change Action Committee desires,” he wrote. “The Monroe County Commission recognizes what redirected savings from a less expensive method of disposing of yard waste can do for the Sustainability Program. Incineration is demonstrably a less expensive way to eliminate yard waste. Composting can work well in areas where acres of cheap, expansive, rural, open, unused, farmland, however, due to transportation cost, even still, mulching and composting elsewhere can be more expensive than incineration.”

He added that saving money will mean the sustainability program can be implemented sooner.

“By utilizing a less costly operation of disposal these savings can be used to implement our Sustainability Program and Climate Action Plan sooner rather than later. Doing our part in reducing our demand for fossil fuels, reducing our demand for fossil fuels generated beyond the boundaries of the good old U.S. of A., we stabilize the cost of solid waste removal to our residents for the next 10 years while doing the right thing.”

The county’s sustainability program manager Rhonda Haag, who seems to be integrally connected with the approach, has been less than forthright about what the commission plans and how it will go about it. Originally scheduled for a vote in December, the plan was suddenly withdrawn and changed. Then there was to be a vote next week and now Haag says she will just make a report and the vote will be taken in March.

She reported in the Citizen that the committee was divided on the issue with some in favor and some against. In fact, no vote had been taken and she later corrected the information to say that member Chris Bergh of The Nature Conservancy was neutral on the approach and not in favor.

Members of the Climate Advisory group have expressed frustration about the lack of information. The consultant’s report was just made available to the committee and came as a result of a direct request. The group’s chair, Alicia Betancourt, who is a county employee, has cited an EPA study to defend the choice. She wrote, “We have used two different GHG accounting methods, The EPA warm method has GHG emissions being within 2 percent for both in county incineration, WTE [waste to energy] and composting.”

In other words, it’s all about the same so if incineration is the cheapest the county should do that.

3. No bids on project

The final serious issue is a financial one. The choice of Rudy Krause Construction to undertake this project, including purchasing the necessary equipment, came without any request for proposals (RFP) from the county even though the contract is for $2 million over two years. The Blue Paper received an anonymous email that questioned this also. The person wrote,

“This contract which is worth almost a million dollars a year, for two years, was not put out for bids. However, a very small business (a woman selling popsicles for $ 3.00, and willing to pay $ 100.00 per month in rent to the BOCC) that had been proposed to be located at Higgs Beach was denied and it was suggested by the BOCC that the vendor spot be put out to bid.”

Good question and one that needs further investigation.

The county’s Climate Change Advisory Committee has been very deliberative in its process, only coming out with a report and recommendations late last year. It will now take another year to prepare an implementation document. The county will then have five years to reduce emissions by 20 percent at a time when climate scientists such as James Hansen are saying the country needs a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gases right now to avert catastrophic climate change.

The plan to incinerate yard waste in the Lower Keys, if nothing else, takes Monroe County in the wrong direction.

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Michael Welber  has lived in Marathon for 16 years, and has long experience as a writer and media producer. Most recently he helped establish and was the first editor of Keys Sunday, a publication of the Keynoter. He has also been active in environmental issues in the Keys, forming and chairing the City of Marathon Green Team and creating and editing GLEE’s monthly newsletter.