Residents of two south Florida counties are feuding over the proposed construction of a huge trash incineration plant that environmentalists say will subject thousands of people to toxic fumes and a risk of polluted drinking water.
The mayor of Miami-Dade county, Daniella Levine Cava, settled on a long-disused airport far from any of its own residential neighborhoods as the preferred site to build a $1.5bn replacement for a previous waste-to-energy facility that burned down last year.
That plant was in the fast-growing municipality of Doral, whose 80,000 residents subsequently mounted a successful campaign to push Reworld, the New Jersey-based waste management company formerly known as Covanta, out of the city.
But while few of Miami-Dade’s residents live close to the planned new facility, the same is not true of neighboring Broward county. There is anger in the municipality of Miramar, which has hundreds of single-family homes in a development less than one-eighth of a mile from the site known as Airport West, which borders the Florida Everglades.
“We have a community that cares about our environment and we have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that we leave behind for generations yet unborn the south Florida that we inherited – one that does not include a toxic, massive industrial operation in one of the most environmentally sensitive regions in the country,” Wayne Messam, the Miramar mayor, said.
“We don’t believe Airport West is a permittable site, just based on the many regulatory hurdles. It threatens the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. It is counter to the over a billion dollars of federal and state dollars to provide clean water storage and supply for all of south Florida.
“It just doesn’t make sense, and we just don’t believe incineration technology should be in anybody’s neighborhood,” Messam added.
Messam, a former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has been a vocal opponent of the project. He spoke at a spirited meeting of the Miami-Dade commission last week in which elected officials passed over Levine Cava’s recommendation and deferred a final decision until November.
He leads an alliance of south Broward cities outraged that Miami-Dade’s search for a site landed on their doorstep without consultation, and with potential significant health implications for their residents who have no say in its placement.
“We’ll continue to make the case why that site should be protected and preserved in its current form, not developed into a very toxic industrial site that will emit PFAS and require toxic ash landfill to support its operations,” he said.
He said he feared “forever chemicals” in the ash could seep into groundwater and poison drinking supplies.
Miramar’s population of 140,000 is almost 50% Black and more than 32% Hispanic, placing racial minorities at the forefront of exposure to pollutants escaping the plant. In its previous existence as Covanta, the company that will build and operate the Miami-Dade incinerator has a long history of lawsuits, fines and settlements for air quality and other environmental violations.
“It’s almost a form of racism, because the places these incinerators end up are not white, middle-class neighborhoods, they’re where people of color live, and you just have to look at the higher levels of cancer and illnesses they have there,” said Noel Cleland, chair of the Sierra Club of Miami.
“I happen to believe claims about no toxic emissions coming out of the smokestack are wrong, but even if you clean everything else out, you’re still producing carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. So by taking our waste and burning it, even if everything else is true, we’re still adding to the CO2 level in the atmosphere, which is what the world is trying to reduce.”
Levine Cava promoted the Airport West as the county’s “best option” at a public meeting in Doral last week, telling residents the site would undergo “extensive permitting and regulatory approvals to further ensure the location is compatible with the need to safeguard our community and environment”.
The proposed plant would be the largest in the US, and burn up to 4,000 tons of trash daily.
At least one Miami-Dade commissioner, however, was not comfortable with the plan. “This is not the moment to build an incinerator. We can work with Broward, we can find other locations, we shouldn’t do this,” Raquel Regalado said in a statement.
The commission will meet again on 6 November, when a number of possible sites for the incinerator will be discussed. Among the options is a land-swap arrangement to move it to remote agricultural land west of Hialeah, reported by the Miami Herald.
Cleland said he would prefer the county to pursue other options to reduce waste, such as more robust recycling programs and charging residents for the quantity of trash they generate. Miami-Dade residents currently produce almost twice as much waste as the national average of 4.4lb (2kg) per person per day, yet the county’s recycling rate of 18% is about half that of its neighbors.
“There is no good place for an incinerator,” he said. “The impact, especially when you’re talking about the air, what goes up the smokestack, doesn’t just affect the one- or two-mile radius around it, it affects all of us.
“I’m just as supportive for the people of Doral as I am of the people who live in Miramar or anyplace else near the Everglades facility.”
