Families Against Cancer & Toxics

Elk River facility is facing waning interest, higher costs

Star Tribune: Newspaper of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis, MN)

Author: Mike Kaszuba
Staff Writer

When President Bush's motorcade traveled past a few weeks ago, Bill Helliwell thought it was best to shut down the Elk River Resource Recovery Facility.

He feared that the unexpected explosions that sometimes rock the building might bring more of the kind of publicity that he did not need.

There was a time when the $26 million facility was a Hennepin County showcase for turning household garbage into fuel that is used to generate electricity. Nine mostly metro-area counties had helped build two refuse-derived fuel plants during the late 1980s - a sister facility continues to operate in Newport - as an environmentally sensitive answer to the region's mounting garbage.

Somewhere along the way, however, things unraveled.

``If I had to project back, I don't know if I would have been sold on that technology,'' Penny Steele, a Hennepin County commissioner, said recently, echoing what others have concluded. ``I'm certainly not sold on it now.''

Although the Elk River facility continues to process as much as 1,500 tons of garbage daily, the world around it has dramatically changed. Hennepin County, which ships the most garbage to the plant, pays an annual service agreement fee that last year stood at nearly $16 million. Since the mid-1990s, the county also has paid additional annual subsidies that topped $7 million in 2003.

Most of the counties that ship waste to either Elk River or Newport face similarly escalating costs. That's largely because a 1994 U.S. Supreme Court ruling banned local governments from forcing garbage haulers to take trash to the processing plants. Free to go wherever they wanted, the haulers often chose landfills that imposed lower fees.

In order to compete with landfills and yet fulfill a 20-year contract with the plants, the counties had to dramatically drop the tipping charge at the processing plants, effectively subsidizing the Newport and Elk River facilities. In 1990, haulers in Hennepin County were charged $95 to dump a ton of trash at the Elk River plant. By 1997, the fee had fallen to $41 a ton; in 2003 it was reduced to $39.80 per ton.

Nearly all of the metro counties that use the two plants have voted not to extend the existing service agreements beyond their 2009 expiration dates. While the votes do not necessarily mean the counties will sever their ties with the facilities, the plants are on the defensive.

Across the nation, the once-promising technology has also largely stalled.

A 2004 survey by the Integrated Waste Services Association, a Washington, D.C.-based industry group, showed that there were 89 waste-to-energy plants in the nation, a decrease of nine plants since 2002. No new refuse-derived fuel plants have been built since the mid-1990s, said Maria Zannes, the association's president.