For decades, South Carolina opened its arms to the country’s garbage. We buried out-of-state nuclear waste in Barnwell and hazardous chemical waste in Pineville, on the shores of Lake Marion. We import hazardous waste to burn in incinerators in Spartanburg and York counties and medical waste to burn in an infectious waste incinerator in Hampton County. We still buried New York City garbage in a huge landfill in Lee County.
It may have made sense to dispose of the country’s waste in exchange for the jobs these facilities generated and the taxes they paid – if it weren’t for the fact that buried waste seems to inevitably leak into our water and burnt waste pollutes the air we breathe. Oh, and the fact that waste operators tend to go bankrupt and leave South Carolina taxpayers paying to clean up the mess they left behind.
But we had these problems and they finally woke up state lawmakers, who worked for decades to close the facility or, at least, in the case of the Barnwell repository, close it for most of the nation. In part, it took so long because federal courts consider waste to be “interstate commerce” that the United States Constitution prohibits states from regulating. This means that we cannot charge extra fees for out-of-state waste. Therefore, we have learned that the only way to prevent waste companies from importing other people’s waste into our state is to limit the amount of waste that can be buried or burned here.
That’s why we were pleasantly surprised last week when a House subcommittee quickly rejected a provision in H.3753 that would have made a hole in the limit of how much waste a company can incinerate in South Carolina – increasing the current 600 tons per day in a factor of eight, to 5,000 tons.
Unfortunately, this is not the Legislative’s only effort to put South Carolina back in the big trash business. On Thursday, the Senate Medical Affairs Committee passed a bill that would remove the protective grids we put in place to protect taxpayers and the environment from the problems faced by so many waste companies.
The project would make it easier for companies to melt plastic waste to turn it into new products and fuel, changing the classification of pyrolysis and gasification – along with processes like “solvolysis” that even many experts have never heard of – from recycling to a new category called “advanced recycling”. Under the S.525, as well as the part of H.3753 that is still alive, advanced recycling companies would not have to make a deposit like the waste handlers to cover any cleaning costs if they had accidents or closed. And they would not have to demonstrate that there is a need for their facilities to handle SC waste.
As Senator Sandy Senn explained in her newsletter: “The manufacturer’s goal is to try to pick up plastic waste and create aircraft fuel or crayons (yes, it was a wide variety of things that they hoped to make, but they didn’t have a clear plan) They say they will bring high-paying jobs and potentially invest billions, but they wanted relaxed regulations and no title.
American Chemistry Council officials – a lobby group for the “advanced recycling” industry – testified at an audience last week that these companies should be considered manufacturers, not waste disposers, and therefore should no longer be subject to financial guarantees. to do business in South Carolina than Boeing or BMW.
This argument makes sense for many senators, but it only works if you ignore the fact that the raw materials for manufacturing are what the rest of us call garbage – and that one of the biggest arguments for pyrolysis and gasification is that they ‘re a great way to turn waste into energy and raw material for new products.
Are these advanced recycling experiments promising? Absolutely. The Wall Street Journal provided a useful perspective in an article last week entitled “How to turn trash into greener fuels”. The opening paragraph: “For centuries, people have burned waste to create energy, sending a wave of carbon into the atmosphere. Transforming trash into clean fuel, however, was an alchemy confined to fiction, like the film ‘Back to the future’. Now, a handful of companies want to turn household waste into low-emission fuels for airplanes, trains and trucks. “
But, as that very nice article made clear, everything is still experimental. And, as South Carolina environmental protection organizations remind us, the plastic that companies would use and be allowed to store in large quantities on site is highly flammable – and has produced some tremendous fires in South Carolina and across the country .
And none of the advocates of the legislation was able to answer the question asked by Betsy La Force of the Coastal Conservation League: “If the chemical recycling industry is solid and business models are successful, why are they not willing to operate under our laws? “
House members were wise to reject an invitation to large-scale incineration companies to send waste from outside the state to South Carolina to supply their businesses. Senators should reject attempts to eliminate waste accident protections that our state has created as a result of painful and expensive experiences.