Waste Disposal solid
see waste management, which includes several big co's
mafia ties?
native americans
SEE INCINERATOR
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CONTEXT?
May 11, 2026
Zeldin’s EPA Is Letting Trash Incinerators Poison Children. Now It’s Being Sued
Weak federal rules allow incinerators to release cancer-causing pollutants into communities of color, harming children’s development before they are even born
Contacts
Robert Valencia, rvalencia@earthjustice.org
Washington, D.C. —
Community groups from multiple states today sued the Environmental Protection Agency for failing to establish strong emission rules for municipal solid waste incinerators, large facilities that burn trash for profit and release mercury, lead, dioxins, and other cancer-causing pollutants into neighborhoods across the country.
The lawsuit, filed by Earthjustice and the Environmental Integrity Project on behalf of Sierra Club, Ironbound Community Corporation, East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, South Baltimore Community Land Trust, and Florida Rising, argues that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s agency has defied the Clean Air Act by setting incinerator emission standards far weaker than what modern pollution controls can achieve and far weaker than the law requires.
“These incinerators are burning garbage and releasing poisons that cause cancer and can harm children’s development,” said Jonathan Smith, Earthjustice attorney. “Every day that the agency delays strong standards, families in places like Newark, South Baltimore, and across Florida pay the price with their health because corporations want to save some money instead of doing right for the surrounding communities.”
Municipal solid waste incinerators are among the largest sources of dioxin pollution in the United States. Dioxins are potent carcinogens with no safe level of exposure, capable of causing permanent harm to a child’s development even before birth. These same smokestacks release mercury, arsenic, and cadmium — dangerous pollutants linked to cancer, heart disease, and lifelong developmental damage. Yet despite the well-documented risks, the EPA failed to strengthen its regulations, leaving communities to bear the health consequences while companies continue to profit.
Incinerators are spread across the country, but their impacts are not felt equally. In Newark, Covanta’s Essex facility, located in a community where 78% of residents are people of color, emitted more than two million pounds of air pollutants in 2020 alone. In South Baltimore, the BRESCO incinerator towers over a predominantly Black neighborhood. People throughout Florida are dealing not only with the current, polluting incinerators in their backyards, but also the threat of new incinerators being placed in their communities.
Quotes from our clients and partners
“Our children grow up breathing some of the most polluted air in California. Weak federal rules let incinerator corporations off the hook while our families pay with their health,” said Andrea Luna, policy analyst at East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice. “Corporations should not be allowed to profit from poisoning us.”
“Floridians watched a Reworld incinerator burn for weeks and breathed the smoke. We filed complaints, we showed up, and we were ignored,” said MacKenzie Marcelin, deputy campaigns director, Florida Rising. “The Zeldin EPA’s failure to protect us is an injustice that falls hardest on communities that need their help the most.”
“Ironbound residents live with elevated asthma rates, cancer diagnoses, and the daily reality of what comes out of that smokestack,” said Alejandra Torres, assistant director of organizing and advocacy at the Ironbound Community Corporation. “Our community should not have to go to court every time we want a company or the government to follow the law.”
“The science on dioxins, lead and mercury is not in dispute, these chemicals cause cancer, interrupt healthy brain development, and harm children the most,” said Jane Williams, chair of the Sierra Club’s National Clean Air Team. Communities hosting these facilities, which are often environmental justice communities, have waited decades for the clean air protections the Clean Air Act requires. EPA’s failure to adopt a rule which protects the health from these emissions is costing people their lives.”
“These incinerators have been operating under illegal standards for decades while families in nearby communities get sicker,” said Haley Lewis, senior attorney, Environmental Integrity Project. “It’s time for the EPA to stand by the communities they are meant to protect.”
Read *Decades of Denial*, Earthjustice’s report on municipal waste incinerators.
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ew 720
How COVID-19 Creates Food Waste Mountains That Threaten the Environment
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Toxic PFAS Fallout Found Near Incinerator in Upstate New York
Sharon Lerner
PFAS contamination was found in soil and water near an incinerator in New York state that has been burning firefighting foam for the Department of Defense.
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omfg
COVID COVER BS?
proposal to Change Rule on Nuclear Waste DisposalA proposal from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would allow for the disposal of some nuclear waste in municipal landfills, rather than a licensed nuclear waste facility. Status: Proposed rule change published March 6, 2020; public comment period closes April 20, 2020.
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Proposal to Change Rule on Nuclear Waste Disposal
A proposal from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would allow for the disposal of some nuclear waste in municipal landfills, rather than a licensed nuclear waste facility.
Status: Proposed rule change published March 6, 2020; public comment period closes April 20, 2020.
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Adam Minter, "Secondhand"Adam Minter reported on the export of used goods and the impact…BOOKTV 1219
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great: environmental justice for the win as Detroit shuts down nation’s largest municipal trash incinerator
- Environmental justice activists in Detroit have fought for decades to get a polluting trash incinerator named “Detroit Renewable Power” shut down.
- Their efforts succeeded earlier this year, when the plant finally shut down, on March 27, although the site still operates as a garbage transfer station.
- “Most of the waste” — one million tons of solid waste from 13 southeastern Michigan counties — “[came] from whiter, more affluent communities, placing the burden of disposal on a mostly African American, lower-income community — classic environmental racism,” Kim Hunter, an environmental justice activist with Breathe Free Detroit, told a reporter.
- Air pollution from the incinerator has caused spiking asthma rates and lung health problems in nearby African American neighborhoods, which also have endured daily life amid nauseating garbage odors.
- A 2016 state report found that asthma rates for Detroit adults are nearly 30 percent greater than those in the rest of the state.
- U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the congresswoman representing the neighborhoods near the incinerator, wants local residents to have “legal recourse” and “include the community in conversations about what will happen next with the property surrounding the incinerator.”
- Read all about it in Midwest Energy News.
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https://www.ecowatch.com/us-china-foreign-waste-2553215414.html
U.S. Asks China to 'Immediately Halt' Ban on Foreign Waste
Last year, China—the world's largest importer of waste—announced it no longer wanted to take in other countries' trash so it could focus on its own pollution problems.
This unexpected policy shift, which took effect Jan. 1, has left exporters in the U.S., Canada, Ireland, Germanyand other European countries scrambling for solutions for their growing mountains of trash, the New York Timesreported.
But rather than using this as an opportunity to improve and reshape domestic waste management and to force manufacturers to produce less waste, Washington has asked Beijing to reverse the ban.
On Friday, a U.S. representative at the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Council for Trade in Goods expressed concerns that China's foreign waste ban could cause a fundamental disruption in global supply chains for scrap materials, Reuters reported.
"We request that China immediately halt implementation and revise these measures in a manner consistent with existing international standards for trade in scrap materials, which provide a global framework for transparent and environmentally sound trade in recycled commodities," the official said at the meeting in Geneva.
"China's import restrictions on recycled commodities have caused a fundamental disruption in global supply chains for scrap materials, directing them away from productive reuse and toward disposal."
The request will likely fall on deaf ears amid President Donald Trump's threat to impose penalties on up to $60 billion in Chinese imports. He has also called China an "economic enemy" of the U.S. and announced steep tariffs on solar panels, steel and aluminum imports.
China's regulation, announced last July, is designed to reduce the country's environmental pollution by banning 24 types of imported waste, including plastics, mixed paper, mining slap and discarded textiles.
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https://www.ecowatch.com/plastic-pollution-mcdonalds-2525962206.html
...In a separate announcement on Tuesday, McDonald's said it will add recycling to its more than 36,000 locations around the world by 2025 and pledges that all packaging on customer products will come from "renewable, recycled or certified sources" by that same year.
The moves from Iceland and McDonald's are very important. Sure, an individual's own efforts to reduce their plastic footprint makes a difference, but when global corporations also step up to reduce waste, it can make a big impact.
"The onus is on retailers, as leading contributors to plastic packaging pollution and waste, to take a stand and deliver meaningful change," Richard Walker, Iceland's managing director, said. "Other supermarkets, and the retail industry as a whole, should follow suit and offer similar commitments during 2018. This is a time for collaboration."
Iceland aims to become the first major retailer globally to eliminate plastic packaging from its own brand. Its new products will consist of paper or pulp trays food trays and paper bags instead of plastic ones. The items will be fully recyclable through domestic waste collection or in-store recycling facilities.
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Who will be on the panels instead?
Though the agency didn’t release a full list today, Pruitt introduced the new heads of the three main committees.
- Michael Honeycutt, lead toxicologist for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality in Austin, takes over as chairperson of the Science Advisory Board. Honeycutt has challenged EPA moves to tighten standards for ozone pollution. He replaces Peter Thorne, head of the University of Iowa’s Department of Occupational and Environmental Health in Iowa City.
- The new head of the scientific counselors panel is Tony Cox, an expert in risk analysis whose private consulting firm in Colorado lists industry clients in the oil and chemical industries. It was previously led by Deborah Swackhamer, a professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis who studies toxic chemicals in the environment.
- On the clean air committee, it’s Paul Gilman, an executive at Covanta, a New Jersey company that handles waste, including incinerating waste to produce energy. He worked at EPA during former President George W. Bush’s administration as the agency’s science adviser. He replaces Ana Diez Roux, an epidemiologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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