Florida’s governor loves a trash incinerator, as long as it is in a community of color. One thing you can say for Ron DeSantis, he’s consistent. He never fails to bend the power of the state to favor white residents and create disadvantages for everyone else. In addition to mounting a multi-year assault on Disney World to show his distaste for LGBTQ+ people, he has signed into laws that prohibit the teaching of critical race theory in Florida schools and universities and ban public colleges and universities from spending money on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. He also put together a special goon squad to go after voters of color.
In February 2023, the trash incinerator for Miami-Dade burned down. Before that, the county sent half of its trash to that incinerator. Now it is is burying much of its trash in a local landfill or trucking it to a central Florida facility, a situation that is not sustainable in the long term. The county produces nearly double the national average per person of garbage, in part because its primary business model — tourism — creates a lot of trash. Joe Kilsheimer, executive director of the Florida Waste-to-Energy Coalition, told Grist recently, “We have an industrial scale economy that produces waste on an industrial scale and we have to manage it on an industrial scale.”
Miami-Dade has plans for a new $1.5 billion trash incinerator, but has spent the past 23 months debating where to put it. All the proposals except one are in communities of color. “They want to be race neutral,” said Dominique Burkhardt, an attorney with Earthjustice, which filed a complaint against Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection in March 2022. But that ignores “the very real history in our country of racism and entrenched systemic discrimination.” Readers who may not be familiar with this history of bias in Florida are encouraged to watch the movie Rosewood.
One proposal was to simply build the new incinerator in the same location as the old one. In fact, the county was prepared to do precisely that until they got a call from representatives of a certain disgraced former president (and now convicted felon). It seems the Doral country club is just 3 miles away and having a new modern trash incinerator close by was not acceptable. The county dutifully turned its attention to other locations.
Burdening Communities Of Color
All four of the alternative sites were in or near some of the county’s most diverse communities. The state of Florida is arguing in federal court that race should not be a consideration in permitting industries that pollute the environment. But historical racism like segregation and redlining, combined with poor access to health care and exposure to pollution, has a lasting impact on health, said Keisha Ray, a bioethicist with the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
Studies have shown that neighborhoods with more low income and minority residents tend to have higher exposure to cancer-causing pollutants. Communities with large numbers of industrial facilities also have stark racial disparities in health outcomes. Incinerators emit pollutants such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and fine particulate matter, which have been associated with heart disease, respiratory problems, and cancer. Oddly enough, it is precisely those same pollutants that the new congestion charges in New York City are designed to address.
People living near an incinerator often don’t have the political power to push the industries out. Ignoring the environmental impacts sends a clear message to residents who live there “What you’re saying is, ‘Those people don’t matter.’” Ray said. When it comes to Ron DeSantis — who holds himself as a devout Christian — “those people” definitely don’t matter to him.
“There is no perfect place,” Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said in a recent memo to county leaders. What is happening in South Florida is indicative of what some see as a broader trend in the national fight for environmental justice, which calls for a clean and healthy environment for all, including low income and minority communities.
Too often, land inhabited by Black and Hispanic people is unfairly overburdened with air pollution and other emissions from trash incinerators, chemical plants, and oil refineries that harm their health, said Mike Ewall, director of Energy Justice Network, a nonprofit that advocates for clean energy and maps municipal solid waste incinerators. “All the places that they would consider putting something no one wants are in communities of color,” he said.
More than 60 municipal solid waste incinerators operate nationwide, according to data from Energy Justice. Even though more than 60% of incinerators are in majority-white communities, those in communities of color have more people living nearby, burn more trash, and emit more pollutants, Ewall said. In Florida, six of the nine existing incinerators are in places where the percentages of people of color are higher than the statewide average of 46%, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency’s EJScreen, an online tool for measuring environmental and socioeconomic information for specific areas.
Inequality Is Not A Family Value
President Biden created a national council to address inequities about where toxic facilities are built and issued executive orders mandating that the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Justice address these issues. Readers are free to make up their own mind about how long that policy will last in the next administration. During his term, Trump proposed drastic reductions to the EPA’s budget and staff and rolled back rules on clean air and water, including the reversal of regulations on air pollution and emissions from power plants, cars, and trucks. That’s a big concern for minority neighborhoods, especially in states such as Florida.
Florida is one of 23 states that have petitioned the courts to nullify key protections of the Civil Rights that prohibit racial discrimination by organizations receiving federal funding and prevent polluting industries from overburdening communities of color. Those rules ask the states “to engage in racial engineering,” argued Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody in an April 2024 letter to the EPA, co-signed by attorneys general for 22 other states. A federal court in Louisiana, which sued the EPA in May 2023, has since stopped the agency from enforcing the rules against companies doing business in that state. Dismantling the Civil Rights Act has been one of the primary goals of radical conservatives because they believe it unfairly burdens whites. To those accustomed to privilege, equality feels like a punishment.
As local governments in Florida and elsewhere turn to incineration to manage waste, the industry has argued that burning trash is better than burying it in a landfill. Kilsheimer, whose group represents the incinerator industry, said Miami-Dade has no room to build another landfill, though the toxic ash left behind from burning trash must be disposed of in a landfill somewhere. “This is the best solution we have for the conditions that we have to operate in,” he said.
Is An Incinerator The Only Option?
Amy Stuart, a professor of environmental and occupational health at the University of South Florida’s College of Public Health of South Florida, told Grist that burning trash isn’t the only option and that the government should not ignore historical and environmental racism. The antidote is not to put more incinerators and other polluting facilities in majority white neighborhoods, she said. Instead the focus of public money should be on reducing waste altogether to eliminate the need for incinerators and landfills by reducing consumption and increasing recycling, re-purposing, and composting of refuse.
At CleanTechnica, we have a suggestion we think will resolve the conundrum about where to build the new trash incinerator. We think it should go next door to Ron DeSantis’ house. Wouldn’t that be some poetic justice!
