Dirty, smelly built-up land with tractors moving across acres of trash and vultures flying above: That’s the picture of a landfill.
For decades, adding landfill space has been left out of the public discussion of ways to keep up with the massive growth in the amount of garbage Americans produce.
And that’s been the way in Palm Beach County, where the sole landfill is expected to run out of space in about 30 years.
To extend its life, county commissioners have approved building a $1.5 billion incinerator to burn millions of tons of garbage generated in the county every year. It will be the most expensive capital project in the county’s history, more than twice the cost of the $670 million incinerator built in 2015.
But environmentalists say it’s a bad decision and point to a solution they once abhorred — landfills.
They see burying trash as a temporary fix until the county can significantly reduce its waste through recycling and composting, a practice known as zero waste.
And they’re not the only ones talking about it. Those high-rise mountains of garbage are back in the conversation nationwide as officials cope with the results of a throwaway society.
The biggest objection to incinerators is air pollution, specifically toxic chemicals and particles emitted when something is burned.
Landfills are cleaner and far less expensive, environmentalists say.
READ MORE: Facing growing waste crisis, Miami-Dade finally clears way for large-scale composting
Both produce energy. Landfills produce a greenhouse gas, methane, but operators cap it, burn it and sell it to produce energy. Likewise, the enormous amount of heat produced by incinerators also can be converted to kilowatts.
The Broward County plan appears to envision what environmentalists want for Palm Beach County; however, it doesn’t rule out incinerators.
In a draft 20-year plan for waste disposal, it has set a goal of recycling 75% of its solid waste, which is threatening to overrun its incinerators and its landfill. As part of that plan, it would expand its landfill capacity or ship garbage out of the county.
Miami-Dade County’s largest incinerator burned to the ground in Doral in 2023. Mayor Daniella Levine Cava at one point last year supported expanding the county’s landfills or developing one in Central Florida because county commissioners couldn’t decide on a site for an incinerator.
Nearby residents or property owners protested in droves. Opponents included President Donald Trump’s son, Eric, who lobbied to ensure an incinerator wouldn’t be built near Trump National Doral resort.
Miami-Dade commissioners have voted to build an incinerator.
Incinerators reduce the amount of waste by as much as 90%, said Dan Pellowitz, executive director of Palm Beach County’s Solid Waste Authority. The incinerator’s ash is still buried in the landfill, which is northwest of Florida’s Turnpike and 45th Street in West Palm Beach.
But a critic of incinerators who has studied Palm Beach County’s plan, approved Oct. 8, says the air pollutants they release can cause cancer, birth defects and urinary tract diseases as well as exacerbating asthma.
Mike Ewall, founder and director of Energy Justice Network, a national nonprofit that supports local communities fighting polluting waste facilities, says the landfills are much safer when it comes to pollution, especially when combined with expanded recycling to work toward zero waste.
Linda Smithe, executive committee chair for the Sierra Club Loxahatchee Group, told commissioners when they voted unanimously to build an incinerator, that landfills aren’t the “end-all” solution.
“The problem is we have too much waste,” she said.
But eliminating most of the county’s garbage is a pipe dream, County Commissioner Maria Marino said.
“For those who say, ‘zero waste,’ that‘ll never happen,” she said Oct. 8.
Garbage rates to rise 28%
Commissioners, sitting as the Solid Waste Authority board, approved building a new incinerator on the same spot as the incinerator that dates to 1989. The 2015 incinerator will remain.
The old incinerator will close in about three years. The new one is expected to open in 2034. In the interim, the county plans to truck waste to other landfills.
A year after the $1.5 billion incinerator opens, property owners will pay $262 in annual fees, up from $205 next year —- a 28% increase. Part of those fees go toward the facility’s $103 million yearly debt.
Both incinerators produce electricity that powers the authority’s complex and lights up 90,000 homes. That brings in about $49 million in annual revenue.
When the 1989 plant is demolished, the authority will lose about $25 million a year for the electricity but will save $55 million in operator fees, Pellowitz told Stet News.
The county’s landfill handles trash from all over Palm Beach County. During the five years that the new incinerator is being built, the excess trash will be shipped to landfills in other counties.
By burning trash before burying it, the 2015 incinerator extended the life of the county’s landfill, by nearly 30 years to 2057. But the old incinerator reaches the end of its lifespan in 2029. If it’s not replaced, the landfill would run out of space by 2044, Pellowitz said.
The new incinerator would extend the landfill’s lifespan to 2064.
Incinerators emit many air pollutants
Pellowitz, who is leaving his county job this month, is adamant that there is zero evidence that incinerators have harmed human health.
“These modern plants are safe and highly regulated,” he said at the Oct. 8 meeting.
But incinerators emit a number of air pollutants. The most damaging to health are particulate matter, lead, mercury, dioxins and furans, the University of Florida’s Thompson Earth Systems Institute reports. There is no safe dose of these, Energy Justice asserts.
The 2015 Palm Beach County facility was the first built nationwide since 1995 because of concern about expense and the harm to health from pollution, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The incinerators are dirtier than coal plants, Energy Justice’s Ewall said.
Pellowitz points out that the county’s 2015 incinerator has the best technology available to remove or make harmless particulates, mercury, pollutants that cause acid rain and nitrogen oxide and that the new one will be even better.
But the way the county is required to measure and monitor pollutants is flawed, Ewall said.
Under state law, only three of the pollutants are watched continuously — nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide. Some, such as dioxins and furans — the most toxic chemicals known to science — are typically tested only once a year because EPA regulations require only one burner per plant be tested once a year. The 2015 plant has three, so each is tested every three years for dioxins and furans, Ewall said.
Toxic metals such as mercury and lead, not tested only once a year, he said.
Despite that, Palm Beach County has better air quality than other large counties, including Orange and Duval, which don’t have incinerators, UF reports. The Air Quality Index measures six pollutants, ozone-level gas, lead, particle pollution, carbon monoxide and sulfur and nitrogen dioxides.
The SWA has found another burning perk, Pellowitz said.
Tons of copper, aluminum, steel and other metals that aren’t separated by homeowners — so far enough to build 1.1 million cars — are sifted out before trash enters the incinerator or even grabbed from the ash. Otherwise those metals would be dumped into the landfill.
Despite protests and the building of landfills across the country and elsewhere in the world, Florida remains a fan of incinerating trash. The amount of trash burned in Florida is 20% of all the trash burned nationwide, Energy Justice reports.
Landfills are cheaper to build
One advantage to landfills is they’re less expensive to build.
Miami-Dade’s Levine Cava estimated building a landfill to handle that county’s waste in Central Florida would cost $556 million, about one-third of the construction cost of Palm Beach County’s new incinerator.
The incinerators have extended the life of Palm Beach County’s 330-acre landfill significantly. They don’t save it completely, however, 30% of the burned material — the leftover ash — is buried.
Without more recycling and composting, the trash will continue to pile up. Palm Beach County requires homeowners to separate recyclables from trash but does not require the same for restaurants, hotels and other commercial properties.
Along with the amount of trash it produces, the county’s population is expected to climb about 20% to about 1.8 million in 2050 from about 1.5 million in 2024, according to UF population projections quoted by the SWA in its latest landfill depletion report.
During the five years after the 1989 plant is torn down, the county projects that it will spend $270 million to ship waste out of the county. County officials say they are looking at Okeechobee and Osceola counties.
One Miami-Dade County commissioner told the Miami Herald that the landfill idea made financial sense, especially if the county owned the landfill.
“This is a solution for now,” Raquel Regalado said.
Why no new landfills in Palm Beach County since 1989
The county hasn’t built a landfill for 35 years.
It abandoned plans for a second landfill west of Boca Raton in the early 1990s after the proposal drew intense criticism from residents as west Boca grew.
At the Oct. 8 meeting, Pellowitz explained why the landfill option hasn’t come up since 2007.
That’s when the county explored putting a landfill on 1,600 acres it owns among the sugar cane fields west of the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, the northernmost remnant of the Everglades, but commissioners rejected that site and asked for three others to consider.
Pellowitz said the county found viable sites near the Okeelanta cogeneration plant south of South Bay, on County Road 880, and on Southern Boulevard at U.S. 98, all west of 20-Mile Bend. Commissioners rejected them all in 2009 after neighbors; environmentalists, including the Sierra Club; and federal entities such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, opposed landfills in the Everglades Agricultural Area.
“There was nobody who supported a landfill out west,” he said.
Instead, commissioners approved burning trash.
Landfills are the oldest solution to waste in history
Ken Russell, lobbyist for the Sierra Club, told Miami-Dade commissioners that his group was “very excited” about the mayor’s landfill proposal.
“We would really like to help the county recognize there is a new version of landfilling that is different from what we’ve seen in the past,” he said.
Landfills, first used 5,000 years ago on the Greek island of Crete and by the Calusa tribe in Southwest Florida, are the oldest way to dispose of garbage.
The first modern, sanitary landfill in the United States was built in 1937 in Fresno, Calif. Landfills got a bad reputation as trash went to manmade dumps that allowed liquid from the waste, known as leachate, to seep into groundwater and large amounts of methane gas to be released into the air. Fresno’s landfill became a Superfund federal cleanup site.
Congress in the 1970s required landfill operators to install impermeable liners, collect the leachate for proper disposal and to cap and burn the methane. The leachate disposal was especially important in Florida where the water table is close to the surface and rain is frequent. The year before the county landfill was built, the U.S. Geological Survey found a leak from the Lantana dump into the aquifer.
Landfills encourage recycling and composting, a way to reduce the amount of trash, which has skyrocketed as residents readily toss cheap containers, such as styrofoam, plastic and aluminum cans.
The “landfill crisis” of the 1960s, when experts predicted they were rapidly running out of space, prompted widespread recycling. Now, more people recycle than vote, American Waste Management, a trash management consultant, says on its website.
Another crisis in the 1980s brought about more waste reduction.
The famous Mobro 4000 barge with about 3,000 tons of garbage left New York City in 1987 when its landfill reached capacity. It was headed for North Carolina, but after news reports, the state rejected it. The barge traveled all the way to Belize, turned away by several states and countries on the way. Then it went back to New York, where its load was eventually burned and the ash buried.
The incident has been widely cited as prompting another surge in recycling.
Zero waste strategy still possible, environmentalist says
Though county commissioners have taken their vote to build an incinerator, the process has barely begun.
Ewall said the county could employ a zero waste strategy of paying per bag, for example, and get a 44% average reduction in waste in half the time it takes to build the incinerator. If residents are charged by the bag, they recycle more.
Staffers never prepared a presentation for commissioners with landfills as an option. With Pellowitz’s surprise announcement in September that he is leaving, his successor — potentially his chief engineer, Ramana Kari — could change the authority’s direction.
But Marino, who served as mayor until November, said she doesn’t think the landfill ideas are compelling despite the data Ewall presented at an Oct. 28 meeting she attended of the North County Neighborhood Coalition in Palm Beach Gardens.
“It’s not really an incinerator,” she said. “It’s a reusable energy facility that … puts out (less), as Dan Pellowitz would say, emissions than a fireworks show.
“So while I applaud you for what you said,” she told Ewall. “You can adapt data any way you want.”
Ewall was undeterred.
“You can take that $1.5 billion,” he said, “and do much more with it by spending even a fraction of it on zero waste systems.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated after publication with more information about ways to reduce waste.
This story was originally published by Stet News Palm Beach, a WLRN News partner.
