Proposal to build Athens incinerator should go up in smoke

Thursday, January 19, 2006

The state should deny a Massachusetts company's request to build a large construction and demolition debris incinerator in Athens.

While Maine needs to be responsible for the debris it creates, the state should not become the repository for similar waste from the rest of New England and perhaps beyond.

GenPower of Needham, Mass., has applied to build the incinerator in a Pine Tree Zone in Athens, where it would burn 3 million pounds of construction and demolition debris a day, then bury the ash at Maine landfills. (Pine Tree Zones are state designations that provide tax incentives to encourage investment, new business activity and job creation in economically distressed areas of Maine.)

Under the state Department of Environmental Protection's solid waste rules, GenPower each day could burn up to 45,000 pounds of arsenic-treated wood; 30,000 pounds of asbestos; 30,000 pounds of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, and other plastics; 1,120 pounds of lead; and 300,000 pounds of other debris that contain numerous toxic substances and release cancer-causing dioxin when burned.

That could result in as many as 87 heavy metals and other toxic substances -- including arsenic, cadmium, dioxin, lead and mercury -- being released into the air, water and soil.

Even if the amounts fall within state's limits, the thought of these poisons being released day after day, month after month, year after year should make anyone nervous.

GenPower's proposal becomes even less appealing given that its incinerator would have as many as 200 loud, heavy, diesel-burning trucks a day bringing "demo" waste to the facility.

Coming from the south, many of those trucks probably would travel Interstate 95 to Fairfield, where they would exit onto U.S. Route 201 and take it to Skowhegan. From there, the trucks would travel state route 150 and then 43 to Athens.

They would pass through several small towns and turn Athens into a terminal for demolition debris trucks.

Clearly, the environmental worries, safety risks and logistical concerns associated with the proposed incinerator far exceed its benefits -- including the electricity it would produce.

No other New England state allows incinerators that burn construction and demolition debris. Maine should not become the exception unless it can reach reciprocal agreements with other states calling for them to accept waste from here, such as certain industrial waste, in exchange for our taking, say, some of their building debris.

It should not be a one-way highway that brings millions of pounds of demolition waste to Maine simply because the state is the only one in New England that has not banned the burning of such debris or prevented the ash from being buried here.

It is too easy to say that no building debris should be burned in Maine. We produce plenty of it; therefore, we are responsible for taking care of it.

The solution, however, is not to allow GenPower or any other company to build a large-scale incinerator -- with many health and safety threats -- in Athens or anywhere else in Maine.

Nothing good would result if Maine were to become New England's designated dumping ground for construction and demolition debris.