NEW YORK, NY March 29, 2007 —REPORTER: The more things change, the more things stay the same…especially when it comes to whether we should burn garbage. To the chagrin of many environmental advocates, the issue has been resurrected, nearly 20 years after the defeat of a proposed incinerator at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Last week, the New York City Bar Association hosted a debate on whether burning garbage for electricity would be good for our city. Suzanne Mattei, with the Sierra Club, says she almost hung up when asked to be on the con panel.

MATTEI: I was so annoyed, that here we were doing this again. But that’s what life is, you have keep coming back and going over the same problems, same issues and same arguments again because somebody thinks something is significantly different enough that you need to reevaluate.

REPORTER: Chris Fazio, head of the bar’s environmental law committee, organized the debate. She feels something IS different.

FAZIO: The technology does change, over time, and we do need to continue addressing it. And New York City spends a lot of money trucking our garbage to landfills. Landfilling out of state is very expensive. And New Yorkers don’t like to deal with problems at home.

REPORTER: What’s also changed is the public’s concern over global warming. The city’s garbage export plan relies on trains and barges, and is projected to take thousands of diesel trucks off the streets, cutting their carbon dioxide emissions. That’s great, but what about the landfills where the garbage ends up? Landfills give off methane, a greenhouse gas that’s far more potent than carbon dioxide. Supporters say burning garbage does double-duty for cutting carbon dioxide. It keeps garbage out of a landfill. And it lessens our need to burn fossil fuels like natural gas or oil for electricity.

So, in a wood-paneled meeting hall at the Bar Association’s headquarters in Midtown, the “incineration wars” begin anew. The Sierra Club’s Suzanne Mattei.

MATTEI: What burns best should be also recycled. Paper, plastics, organics. When you do maximize recycling what’s left is stuff you don’t wanna burn.

REPORTER: Stuff like electronic equipment….batteries….and plastics that currently aren’t recyclable, like Saran Wrap, grocery bags, and salad containers. Burning them releases poisons like mercury and dioxin. Yes, it does, says Nicholas Themelis, a professor at Columbia University. But the industry has advanced, he says, and has developed better ways to capture those toxins.

THEMELIS: Regarding dioxins…I’ll speak about the one thing alone, dioxins. The present waste to energy plants, 88, in total, they produce less than 10 grams. Gone down by one thousand times. This cannot be disregarded. This has to be included in any discussion.

REPORTER: Managers of waste-to-energy plants offered data showing their incinerators consistently operated below – even far below -- their annual allowable pollution limits. But opponents ignore the data. Ellen Connett, director of the Fluroide Action Network Pesticide Project, argues it can’t be trusted. And even a little bit of pollution is too much.

CONNETT: We are asking our engineers the wrong questions. How do we get rid of waste. What we should be asking our engineers is, how can we stop making waste? With all the packaging we have, if we can’t reuse it, recycle or compost it, industry shouldn’t be making it.

REPORTER: More producer responsibility. More public education, so there’s more recycling. Zero waste. That’s what opponents want. They say officials won’t set those goals if they need garbage to burn for electricity. But Jack Warner, head of the Solid Waste Management Authority in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, says his county’s recycling rate almost doubled after he opened an incinerator, because the plant was pulling out metals that weren’t accepted at the curb, like paint cans and bike frames. He calls himself “Lancaster practical” in believing that recycling and incinerating work hand in hand.

WARNER: The problem isn’t a stack that’s 310 feet high with all types of air controls. If you’re worried about nanoparticles, worry about the end of a tailpipe. We’re here to talk about trash and a system, a practical system, where you can take care of your waste for the next ten, twenty, thirty years. And if you think the answer is sending it in a truck to a landfill where New York City waste is typically hated in all communities, that’s not a plan.

REPORTER: But it IS the plan, for the next 20 years. It’s one that many local environmental groups support, with the caveat that sanitation officials beef up efforts to improve recycling. A new outreach office will start doing just that next week. However, even if every New Yorker recycles perfectly, the city’s recent garbage study finds 65 percent of our trash would still be going to landfills. The pro side of the waste-to-energy debate says that’s a missed opportunity to create electricity. The con side says it reveals a failure of the city to imagine a world of zero waste. ‘Round and ‘round the debate goes, like a dog chasing its tail.

In his summary of the debate, Doug Blazey, chairman of the Mid-Atlantic section of the Air and Waste Management Association, declares both sides are right.

BLAZEY: So if we use both the energy of the con side, to make sure we’re protecting ourselves as we go forward, and energy of pro side to develop new technologies...and a little of the gelt that is present in NYC and this metro area to finance some of that, I think we can get there.

REPORTER: But perhaps it’s a misguided optimism. Environmental advocates have already pronounced their opposition to any new technologies that involve combustion. An incinerator is an incinerator, they say, no matter how you gussy it up. Compromise is not an option. And that has supporters of waste-to-energy perplexed, as they see other countries, like Germany and Japan, recycle, reduce waste, AND burn whatever is left. Columbia University’s Nicholas Themelis calls landfill methane “low-hanging fruit” in the quest to cut greenhouse gas. For the 9,500 tons of trash New York City sends each day to landfills, it’s a fruit that will likely remain unplucked for years to come.