Biomass Incinerator: Springfield City Council finally hearing our opposition?

 Last Tuesday, Election Day, dozens of us flyered polling places in Springfield MA, urging voters to call their city councilors and say "NO!" to the wood-burning incinerator being proposed by Palmer Renewable Energy (PRE).  By the end of the week we had won over the remaining ward councilors, some of whom were going to sponsor a resolution for the December meeting, and then we received a message from at-large Council Tom Ashe, saying he was going to sponsor two resolutions for tonight-- one calling for a Full Environmental Impact Report of the proposal and the other saying that PRE has to come back to the City Council before their amended proposal is approved again.  Of course, PRE has to go back before the council in any case, which maybe Councilor Ashe doesn't know.

More than a dozen of us are signed up for the speak-out portion of the council meeting tonight.  We'll be focusing on the health impact a plant like this will have on our community.  We didn't expect to stick around for the rest of the meeting, but now that there's actually a resolution, we'll stay and see what happens.

I am not so naive as to think our battle is won-- the developers are smarmy and they'll have plenty to say-- but it's a step in the right direction.  I'll post about the results and next steps.


"We are talking about two grand projects in dispute. On the one side is the project of capital and imperialism, which signifies looting, which signifies death, and which signifies all of the false solutions to climate change that we reject entirely.

We assert that we need to change the system and not the climate. We assume the construction of another project: the project of life. A project based on principles that defend life, the Mother Earth, and that is based on another model of social, economic, political and cultural development. That is why we are here."
-Itelvina Masioli, a Brazilian leader of the international small farmer movement, La Via Campesina, speaking on April 20, 2010, at the People's World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Ronnie Cummins is attending the summit as a representative of the OCA.  Organic Consumers Organization

Photo from the City Project at Flickr.

Greenfield residents sold down the river-- or should I say sewage line?

"If you wouldn't want to drink it, why would you want to breathe it?"  That very reasonable question by a Greenfield resident to the Greenfield Appointment and Ordinance Committee at a public hearing last Monday summed up the concerns of the 100 people in the Greenfield Middle School auditorium..

Greenfield is one of the three communities targeted for the development of biomass plants, Governor Patrick's newest, one-size-fits-all solution to Massachusett's energy needs. Biomass developer Matthew Wolfe's original proposal called for the plant to purchase water from the municipality to dissipate heat from its incinerator.

Now Wolfe wants to purchase partially-treated waste water from the town instead. Gotta keep those costs down, you know? The waste water would be pumped uphill to the plant.

Not one of the residents of Greenfield, many of whom were medical and scientific experts, spoke in favor of this idea.

First, there's the pathogens that might be emitted-- viruses and bacteria that abound in partially treated water. But even assuming that most of them would be destroyed in the heating process, that leaves everything else. A 2005 survey of drinking water in 42 states by the Environmental Working Group found 141 unregulated chemicals and an additional 119 for which the Environmental Protection Agency has set health-based limits, including disinfection byproducts, nitrates, chloroform, barium, arsenic and copper. CommonDreams.

Two categories of chemicals were of particular concern to Greenfield residents: antibiotics and endocrine disruptors.  The dangers of antibiotic overuse are becoming better-known: we get resistant to antibiotics and so do the pathogens.  Endocrine disruptors, which are both hormones and those chemicals which mimic hormones, are less well-known to the public, although biologists are aware of their effect on sexual reproduction on amphibians and fish.  Nicholas Kristof's column, It's Time to Learn From Frogs, details some of the effects already taking place in humans, and it's scary reading.

In the end, after receiving page after page of testimony against the use of waste water for cooling, the
Greenfield Appointment and Ordinance Committee did the only thing they could do-- they approved Wolfe's request.  The chairman of the board tried to get the decision put off for a week so it could be studied, but none of the other three had the guts-- or the intelligence-- to second the motion.

It's not all over for Greenfield residents, who continue organizing against this incinerator and who have a number of legal strategies in play.  We in Springfield, however, had almost almost lost the battle against the incinerator proposed for our community before we even knew knew about the war.  Our incinerator, proposed by Palmer Renewable Energy, will burn mostly construction and demolition wood, contaminated with arsenic, lead, mercury and other toxic chemicals.  We're late in the day getting started, but I don't believe we're too late.  Check out the website for our organizing efforts, Say NO to Construction and Debris Incineration.


Photo from Aliwest44's photostream at Flickr.