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By Dawn Kane

Chester residents understandably become concerned when there’s news of a new polluter wanting to move into town. They’ve been down this road before. Natural gas proponents are currently pushing for a liquified natural gas, LNG, terminal in Chester, and local activists are ready for the fight.

Franc James, CEO of New York-based Penn America Energy Holdings, LLC, told reporters for WHYY that plans for a Chester-based LNG terminal have been in the works for the past five years, and according to media reports, he has been courting local and state politicians along the way with the promise of jobs and an environmentally friendly process.

Zulene Mayfield, founder of Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living, CIRQL, has some ideas about how this will unfold. Mayfield recalls when Westinghouse, the original developer of the trash incinerator, now owned and operated by Covanta Energy, held their first public hearings in her community. Flyers announcing the public hearing landed on her mother’s dining room table, but her mother’s house was 13 blocks away from the proposed site. Mayfield’s own house, across the street from the proposed facility, received nothing. “The flyers were not put out in the immediate area of the incinerator,” Mayfield says.

Mayfield did attend that meeting and officials espoused the benefits of a trash to steam plant. “They said it’s the equivalent of the [steam] you would get in the shower,” she says.  Today Mayfield attributes many of the health issues suffered by members of her community to the pollution released by that plant.

According to a 2017 NOVA report, “Facilities like Chester’s burn the trash inside combustion chambers, which heat water to produce steam. The steam spins a turbine, creating electricity that the company sells to the grid. Burning all that trash releases large amounts of dozens of different pollutants, including nitrogen oxides (NO x ), sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ), and particulate matter, which are tiny bits of solids and liquids a fraction of the width of a human hair. The plant does recycle leftover metals, and the ash and filtered pollutants, which typically occupy 10% of the original volume, are hauled to a landfill.”

Mayfield was on the street after that first meeting and ready to participate in a protest organized by the local Catholic church. But on that day, a church employee came running out and told residents they were canceling the protest. Mayfield said that the church priest, who was the original organizer, had been summoned to the Archdiocese in Philadelphia. Shortly thereafter they were told that neither he nor the church could be involved. “We suspect someone got to him.” But that didn’t stop the protests. “We started meeting in people’s homes,” Mayfield says.

More than 30 years later, the incinerator operates at full capacity. Recent regulatory changes implemented in January of 2023 require operators to reduce the acceptable levels of nitrogen oxide emissions by nearly 40 percent, but in Chester, it’s the proverbial drop in the bucket.

According to the Public Interest Law Center website:

“Chester, Pennsylvania is a small city with a low-income African American population, located in the affluent, mostly white Delaware County – and it is the site of an unprecedented cluster of industrial polluting facilities. Chester has been home to a trash incinerator that handled waste from the entire county, a sewage treatment plant that still receives the entire county’s sewage, and numerous other waste processing plants, oil refineries, and industrial polluters. Essentially, the low-income, black community of Chester has been forced to live amidst the waste of the more affluent, white towns and cities around it.”

And the trash comes from farther away than Delaware County and Philadelphia. A Delaware resident, who didn’t want to be named for this story wrote, “I know of that incinerator in Chester. The trash comes down from Newark, NJ and NYC on trains. Flats with 4 blue trash containers on each get sent off at CSX Wilsmere yard [in Delaware]. The containers get plucked off of the flats onto special trailers and hauled out of there north on I-95 to the Chester incinerator five to six days a week.”

So, residents like Mayfield, who have been protesting the incinerator since the beginning do not want to hear about jobs and environmentally friendly practices from LNG proponents. She knows that there’s a reason they want to invest in bringing more polluting industry to a town of only 6.11 square miles—they don’t want it in their own backyards.

Mayfield urges Philadelphians to tell their city council members to disapprove continuing the city’s trash contract with Covanta. And she asks that local residents and neighbors in surrounding counties tell their elected officials that the proposed LNG terminal makes for a dangerous plan.

“Out of all of the things that CRCQL has fought, this is the thing that scares me the most,” Mayfield says. “It is terrorism, and everyday we’re assaulted…But if the Canadian fires taught us anything, we should understand that my air is your air and your air is my air,” Mayfield says. “Let’s not poison our own damn selves.”

Links:

https://www.patagonia.com/stories/shes-taking-out-the-trash/story-93950.html

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/too-much-pollution/